The Lost Boys
by SunbakedGeoduck
Summary: Will and Nikki have been friends for years, struggling in the low slums of Gotham. When Will hears of work in the tunnels under the city, work he needs badly, he's eager to sign up, but Nikki isn't so sure. When Will disappears into the tunnels, Nikki is determined to bring him back to the surface, but the man leading the underground workers might not let him - or her go so easily.
1. Chapter 1

I run my finger around the rim of the chunky white mug in front of me, removing the last remnants of pale brown froth from the inside of the porcelain. I hear a small tinkling sound, like glass being dropped delicately onto a tiled floor, and I automatically glance up at the front door hopefully, lifting my hand out of the mug and rubbing the foam together between my finger and my thumb. I see a tall woman, dressed elegantly in a stylish navy blue blazer and pencil skirt combination, and my heart sinks. I take a quick peek at the small clock over the door and then I turn my attention back to the coffee mug, mood souring by the second.

Will is fifteen minutes late.

The waitress who served me earlier wanders over to me with her large dark tray, stooping down over my table and carefully gathering up all of the used crockery, her hand almost touching the handle of my coffee mug before she stops to ask whether or not I'm finished. I give her a vague, polite smile and wave my hand courteously towards it, a blessing. She smiles nervously back and busies herself collecting my things; one of her thin copper strands falls loose from her hastily arranged bun and rests intimately in the corner of her eye, but she quickly brushes it back behind her ear. She finishes her tidying and straightens herself, putting on another timid smile as she asks me if I'd like another. I take another glimpse at the clock and I sigh. I order yet another cappuccino, sounding glum even to myself as I speak. The waitress nods curtly, not even having to write it down this time, and then she walks off, shooting me a curious glance over her shoulder as she scurries off again. I'm sure she's thinking that I've been stood up, and I suppose she's not really wrong. I should be used to Will standing me up by now. I hope at least this time it's for a good reason.

I sigh again, and I pick up the newspaper again, eyes scanning listlessly over the things I've read and re-read about six times over and over again. I could probably write out the front page articles by now, I could probably draw every line of Harvey Dent's face perfectly. I'd heard so much about him this week, I swear I could have known him personally; I've been running backwards and forwards between my office and the dry cleaners all week for my boss, Mr. Jacobs , and his wife, for the annual Harvey Dent fundraiser tomorrow night. The elderly Chinese lady running our local dry cleaners gave me a barely disguised look of envy as she'd handed me back Mrs. Jacobs' dress, all close-fitting silver wrapped in shimmery plastic, and I'd almost told her the truth, that I was merely a lowly assistant not fit to step a foot inside Wayne Manor, but I'd kept my mouth closed. It was strangely nice; the look of adulation and jealousy on her wrinkled face, and it's not often in my life people look at me like that. Hell, the only person who looks at me like that is Will, and that's because, somehow, the poor guy has it even worse than I do. I've got a job that isn't a complete nightmare, an apartment that, while on the small (bordering on miniature-esque) side and though with furniture purchased from several seedy-looking charity shops, is still liveable and affordable, and I've got enough money to make sure that I can eat at least two meals a day. Will's a kid who was abandoned in an orphanage in the Narrows. And life hasn't been any kinder to him since the day they forced him out onto the streets and he came knocking on my apartment door, sheepishly asking if he could crash on my couch until he got himself sorted.

I frown, thinking of the perfectly made, slightly mottled couch in my lounge/kitchen, the clumsily sewn patchwork quilt crisp and undisturbed, draped lovingly over the body of my sofa, unused for three days now. I'm used to Will staying out for a night or two, pursing my lips together disapprovingly but silently whenever he stumbles back through the door, fresh bruises already flowering on his tanned skin, cuts running down his large face, a few scrunched-up dollar notes clutched in his meaty fist. But three days is pushing it. Three days is enough to worry me.

The bell above the door tinkles again, announcing another customer. I glance up again quickly, almost certain that it's going to be another disappointment, until I meet his eyes. Small and brown and starting to disappear behind a thick mop of dark hair, but most definitely Will's eyes. My moan of hysterical relief is loud even to me, but I ignore the curious eyes of strangers as I push aside the padded chair and walk to him so quickly it's almost a run. I wrap my arms around him and I pretend not to notice when he flinches, when his arms stay rigidly at his side. I step backwards after a moment and study him, narrowing my eyes in rapidly growing displeasure as I take in his appearance.

He looks… good. Healthier, except for a dozen fresh new bruises and scrapes decorating his skin from head to toe. His hair is still growing at an alarming rate, wild and unruly, but it looks freshly washed, though not well-washed. His beard has been trimmed to a less-frightening degree, and his cheeks have a little more roundness to them. Well, they've always been round, but he looks full now, like he's eaten a good meal or two. Wherever he's been, he's clearly been treated well.

Which makes me even more suspicious. Being treated well in Gotham City is all well and good if you're Bruce Wayne, but, for people like me and Will, being treated well is merely a pipe dream. You're considered lucky if you've got a place to sleep and food to eat, and nearly god-like if you've managed to secure yourself a good job, especially in the current climate. And after all I've heard from Will the last few weeks, all his despairing about how dire the job market is… I'm not _unhappy _that he looks better, of course not, but I would very much like to know where it's come from.

When I turn back around, the waitress is just placing the steaming hot cup of coffee on my table, looking at me and Will with barely concealed interest. I hurriedly order another one, sounding a little too breathless, and she nods, already walking away.

When I look back at Will, he's scowling. He despises charity favours. "You didn't have to do that," he says in his low growl, looking angrily at the strangers seated around us and staring accusingly at the ones who meet his gaze, until they turn away awkwardly. I sigh internally, but I put a fond frown on my face. "Just shut up and drink your coffee, you ass, and then tell me where the hell you've been the last few days. There's a whole bottle of whisky still left in the fridge, and it weirds me out having a full bottle in there after a day."

His face suddenly bursts into a grin, and I feel a little better. "Damn straight you didn't drink my whiskey. Why didn't you drink my whiskey?"

"It would have been weird being the one drunk alone in the apartment for a change."

He scowls again and gives me a light punch on the arm. "I liven up the apartment."

"I wouldn't use the word 'liven', really…"

He's struggling to keep the scowl on his face when we sit back down. I push the cup towards him and he scowls down at it. And then scowls back at me. So I scowl back. "Just drink your damn cup," I command sternly. I widen my eyes and stare intently at him until he meekly picks up his cup and takes a sip, staring sheepishly down at the table the entire time. "There?" he says, putting it down again with a petulant pout. "Happy?"

"Not really, but it's a start." I lean forwards, resting my arms on the table. Harvey Dent's face is smothered beneath my elbow. "Where have you been?"

And then, when his face shuts down and he clenches his jaw, I know that he's not going to tell me without a fight. And that worries me. Will usually tells me everything, good or bad. Him trying to keep something to himself is not like him.

"Trying to find a job," he offers me weakly, taking another sip of his coffee. The waitress brings over the second cup, but I don't even acknowledge her presence. I wonder if she's offended. I feel a twinge of guilt – I'm usually so achingly, sickeningly polite to people – but right now, I don't much care. "Bullshit," I snap, and an elderly couple one table away stare at me disapprovingly. "Where have you been?"

"I've really been trying to find a job, okay?" he snarls back, slamming his mug down onto the table with unnecessary force. The hot brown liquid inside jumps and starts slithering down the sides of his mug, leaving a murky trail where it goes. He glowers at the table top, not meeting my eyes, and runs a hand through his messy hair. There's something in his eyes that's not quite right, something almost like despair. "It's just not…" he starts to say, and then clamps his lips shut, like he's saying something he's not supposed to.

I leap on it hungrily. "Not what?"

He stares defiantly at the table for a few more seconds before sighing. His heavyset shoulders sag noticeably. "It's not… exactly… legitimate stuff," he finally offers reluctantly. His head snaps up, his eyes meeting mine then, and they're alive with desperate excitement. "But it's good money, so everyone's saying. Half of the guys from St Swithin's, they're already in, and they're recruiting more guys, so the other guys are going down tomorrow to sign up," he pauses then and looks down at the table once more, staring unseeingly into his coffee. "And I'm thinking of going with them."

Something twists in my stomach, and I feel suddenly, powerfully ill. "Going where?" My voice shakes as I speak. The coffee sits patiently in front of me, forgotten. The smell of it is making me feel even more sickly.

"Down into the tunnels." Will's voice is quieter now. He glances around, glowering at everybody and anybody, like he's afraid they're listening in.

"Down into the tunnels? For work? I don't understand," I say in frustration, running my hands through my thick mane of brown curls.

"Look, I can't… I can't say too much, 'coz I don't _know _too much, but… they're saying there's someone down in the tunnels that can help people like me-"

"By doing what exactly?" I ask, my voice like ice. "Because this mystery saviour of yours doesn't exactly sound like he's going to help you make applications for the job centre, Will."

"I told you, it's not _legitimate _work," he says, lowering his voice on the _legitimate_. I inhale a breath sharply. "You mean, it's illegal?"

Will purses his lips and doesn't respond.

"Dangerous?" I venture forward, my heart starting to speed up.

Still no response.

"What sort of thing would you be doing exactly?" I demand, lowering my voice to a hiss.

"I don't know!" he splutters, frustrated. "But, really, Nikki, do you _see _me getting a legitimate job any time soon? Huh? Because I've been looking ever since I left St Swithin's and there has been _nothing_. I couldn't even get a goddamn community service job, this is the only thing I have left."

"But breaking the law?" I whisper frantically. "There's seriously no other option for you, other than to enter into a job that could possibly get you jail time?!"

Will gives me a blank look that chills me. "You know well just as well as I do that there's nothing else."

I lean back, feeling hopelessness in my very core. I give him a bitter look. "Is it organised crime? The gangs, Maroni, Falcone, who?"

"It's not one of those gangs," he says, reassuringly. I don't feel very well assured. "Believe me," he adds darkly. "If those gangs were still around and not locked up in Dent's prison, you'd bet I'd be looking for a job with them too."

"Is this guy trying to get the gangs back up again?"

"What, now that the Batman's gone?" Will laughs bitterly. "I don't know. I don't think so. It's different."

"It's not different at all," I snarl, leaning forward again, crushing Harvey Dent's face beneath my arm again. "This guy might sing different words, but he's still using the same tune. This is bad, Will, I don't like this at all."

He stares at me incredulously for a moment. And then his face curdles. I've never seen him look so disgusted and so disappointed in his life, let alone directing that expression at me. "I knew you wouldn't understand," he spits, pushing aside the coffee and standing up from his seat. He bashes the table as he stands, and coffee spills onto the table top, but both of us ignore it. "Do you enjoy lording it up over me that you have a job, is that it? Do you not want me to get one, so you can carry on acting all high and mighty like that?"

I feel like he just slapped me in the face. I flush bright red and tears spring into my eyes. I reach down under the table and grab my bag, not meeting his eyes, determined to be the one who storms off first. "How dare you," I murmur softly, yanking my thick, fraying coat on awkwardly and stepping around the coffee table. I turn to leave, but a thought stops me, and I swivel back to face him again. "If you had any sense, _any sense at all_, you'd stay away the tunnels and whatever's done there," I tell him in a low mutter, not wanting to attract any more prying eyes. "You might think that whatever's done there is your only option left, but I am here to tell you that there is always a better way than this. You think this is your only way to make things better, but it will just end up making it one-hundred times worse and," my voice breaks and I know I have to wrap up quickly or chance crying in a crowded coffee shop. "And I don't want to see one of the only people I have left in this world get sent to prison because they thought they _had to do something_."

I turn on my heel and leave, slamming open the door, sending the bell all aflutter.

I pause in the doorway again, and turn to see his face. His eyes are glassy and his cheeks are red, but he remains stubborn, still standing there with his body all tensed and his fists all bunched up.

"I'll see you at home."

I storm out quickly, into the cold brisk air and the bustling Gotham City streets, shoving my way through the streams off lunch time traffic, wiping my eyes quickly so that Mr. Jacobs doesn't see the tear-stains.

When I get back to the apartment, six hours later, Will is still not back. The emptiness seems even more potent now.


	2. Chapter 2

A day goes by. Two. The whole weekend. Nothing.

When work rolls around on Monday morning, I feel the first twinges of real emotion that I've felt since returning home on Friday night, to find the apartment silent and still, the sofa bed undisturbed and untouched, the freshly washed but clumsily folded pile of Will's clothes still in the pile where I'd carelessly dumped them at the foot of the sofa bed this morning on my way to work. I'd even checked the fridge, mechanically stumbling my way over the small, waist high off-white refrigerator – Will did once say that Jack Daniels whiskey was more important to him than keeping his own organs. When I'd seen the unopened bottle still sitting in the fridge, sulking between my half-empty carton of apple juice and my four-pack of milk-chocolate mousse, it was evident he hadn't been back. Will's solution to dealing with anger – with disappointment, with happiness, with pretty much everything, worryingly enough – was drink and in the mood I'd left him in, there's no way he could have been back here and not cracked open the bottle. There was no way: he hadn't been here.

And now it was looking doubtful that he'd ever come back. I couldn't really process that thought, not seeing my best friend ever ever again; staring at the whiskey bottle, my first thought had been a woeful '_I'm going to have to drink that now, aren't I, and I don't even like JD_'. The first thought, this first jarring unsettling thought, had shocked me back into reality, and I could have cried. I'd stared at it for a few more moments and then I'd gone to the phone, my ancient cord-phone that had probably stopped being produced in the nineties. My hand had been shaking so bad that my fingers had slid over the buttons haphazardly, and I had had to put the phone back in its cradle for a moment, taking a deep breath before trying again.

I'd called everyone that Will trusted enough to divulge intimate parts of his life to. Once I'd finished with those three calls, commanding that they call me the second they even saw someone who looked remotely like Will even as I was putting the phone down, I'd had nothing to do but stand there, uselessly. The urge to call the police was making my fingers twitch impatiently, but there was little to nothing the Gotham police department could, or would, do for me; Will had disappeared of his own accord, and the police weren't all too concerned with spending their valuable time and money looking for a kid from the Narrows. I considered going down to the tunnels, to one of the dozens of manholes scattered around Gotham all running through the same network of underground tunnels, but Will stopped me. _It's not exactly legitimate… I can't say too much… _I'm just one girl, one small, skinny girl. I'm not made to go traipsing through the dark and the unknown, taking on a force of desperate workers. I'd be killed. Most likely in a horribly violent manner.

So I waited. I waited for Will to come back.

Realising it was Monday is a heavy thing. I can feel the relief in my chest, the small lightening of my footsteps as I stroll briskly around the apartment, getting everything ready for the day. Work means concentrating on something other than Will, doing something other than lazing around on the sofa watching news reports about Harvey Dent, interspersed with drinking Will's whiskey and glowering accusingly at the front door. Every time the phone had rung, my heart had started hammering painfully in my chest, keeping up its crazed rhythm until I'd listened to the words being spoken. _He's still not checked in, Nik, I'm sorry…_

The disappointment hits me again anew as I'm putting on my makeup, and my vision gets a little blurrier, but I blink furiously, fighting it back until I can see my face clearly again: my thick mass of light brown curls, my sun-darkened bronze skin, my wide brown eyes. I ignore the paler tint to my complexion and the thick rings of black beneath my eyes that show the sleepless nights of the last few days, and I say to myself '_don't you think about it, don't you think about it at all, and he'll be back before you know it_'. This little chant reverberates inside my head and it helps me lift my head a little higher on my way to work, letting me walk a little taller in my staple, high-heeled black court shoes and my light grey blazer and matching figure-hugging, knee-length skirt.

Even work itself isn't so bad; the office is abuzz with gossip from the Wayne foundation party, and some of the stuff the other assistants come out with makes me smile – '_I hear his face is all burnt and scarred and he's blind in one eye now_' or '_One of the waitresses told me that she's seen him, and he wears a veil over his face and his mouth, so that nobody ever sees his face_' and '_No, that's not right, he wears the veil so he can't get diseases from the staff; he's got gloves and everything, and he burns them all when he has to touch someone_'. The idea of Bruce Wayne, huddled up in the corner of a darkened room, hastily burning up used plastic gloves and huffing desperately into an oxygen tank, is hilarious, but then again, he _could _very well be doing that. Nobody's seen the man in years. He could be cryogenically frozen or something, and his staff is keeping him alive so that he can come back later and restart his empire from scratch.

I shake myself, and collect Mr. Jacobs' coffee with a flustered smile. _Must not get distracted by either Will or theories about Bruce Wayne_.

I still can't help trembling a little whenever the phone rings, even when I'm answering Mr. Jacobs' phone. Once, I catch myself just on the cusp of asking '_Have you heard anything_?' and I just about manage to stutter out "Glenn Jacobs' office, how may I help you?" in an awkward croak.

Even the boss notices my flustered state. "You seem a little distracted today," he comments as I pick up the pile of papers I'd just managed to throw all over the floor. I glance up at him, shocked by the concern in his voice, and for one second, I think he's about to offer me some comfort, or ask me what's wrong. "Get your head back in the game, sweetheart, you've got a job to do," he reminds me sternly, and goes back to sifting through his papers. Shoulders deflating quickly, I slump out of his office dejectedly, collapsing back into my chair with a sigh. Brittany in the stall next to me gives me a strange look, but doesn't question. She's the second girl her boss, my boss' business partner, has had in over the last two weeks, and she's determined to keep her chair.

I give her another week.

Hell, I give _myself _another week if this keeps up.

More days crawl by and still nothing. More calls to say there's been nothing and more staring at the door waiting for nothing.

Friday comes around, a whole week of nothing, and I feel lost. The apartment mocks me every time I open it with its emptiness and all the whiskey has gone. I can't quite bring myself to buy another, even 'just in case Will comes back and is mad that I drank all his JD'. Once, I've stood directly over a manhole, staring down at it with such ferocious intensity that, if looks could kill, there'd be a crater in the earth beneath my feet. But, no matter how much I try to amp myself up, to rip off the manhole, jump down and march down through the tunnels to drag Will out with my own two hands, I can't. I can't bring myself to do it.

The others have noticed my melancholy mood, but have said nothing. The perception of me as just a girl from the Narrows amongst all these well-to-do people has never quite left them, and this permanent sulk I'm in now has only distanced them further from me. I can hear them gossiping just by Brittany's desk; usually, this would annoy the hell out of me, since Brittany has been here for like a week and already she's got more friends in the office than I do, but I can't summon the energy needed for the necessary amount of annoyance.

I'm biting morosely into my chicken caesar wrap when they start up a new topic.

"Where did they find him?"

"I dunno, some tacky bar in the Nar-" There's a pause as the speaker remembers where I am. Thanks for that, guys. "Some tacky bar. Right after the place got all shot up." I recognise the voice; she's Amber, one of Mr. Jacobs' other assistants. If I remember correctly, from one of the many times she's bragged about her _wonderful _boyfriend, he's on the Gotham City police department. And he must be _wonderful at it_.

"By the cops?"

"No, Harry says the cops got there afterwards, and they chased the guys who were doing the shooting right into the sewers."

I suddenly become incapable of swallowing my wrap, and I start coughing frantically, reaching for my water with renewed interest in their conversation.

"The sewers?" The speaker's voice is full of disgust. "Did Harry have to go down there?"

"No, but he says Jim Gordon did."

"The Commissioner?"

"Didn't you hear? He got all washed up outside one of the sewer grates, nearly _dead_," Amber's voice is hushed and full of excitement, but I can still hear her as clear as day. The whole office can probably hear her.

"Did he die?!"

"Not quite, but he's real bad, Harry says. They carried him out to the ambulance and he was talking about some guy in a mask and an underground army. They think he's gone cra-"

I miss the rest of the conversation as I leap up from my desk, already fumbling with the arms of my coat, nearly tripping over my desk chair as I stand. My movement makes a loud clattering noise as I clumsily try to free myself, and all the girls jump, staring at me with accusing, narrowed eyes. I snap "Tell Mr Jacobs I'm not feeling well," at the herd of them in general, and then I'm out the door, sprinting down the street, shoving aside random passers-by as I go. I teeter a little in my heels, but I don't fall; I've been wearing these heels so often recently, they're like an extension of my own feet.

_Nearly dead… some guy in a mask… an underground army._

Will's part of that army. Will's down there.

I have to bring him back.


	3. Chapter 3

"_Open up, James, and open up __**right now**__ or I swear to God, I will kick your front door down and beat you to death with it_."

The air is brisk, whipping around me in a chill that seems to almost exclusively breeze through this neighbourhood, affectionately nicknamed _The New Narrows_ after everybody in the old one got driven crazy (literally), and my coat is quickly falling apart, done up haphazardly as I'd escaped from the office, but I barely even notice it. At this point, I can't tell if my balled-up fists are shaking because it's cold or because I'm angry. Even my insides feel like they're shaking.

I'm getting strange looks from people passing by, but I ignore them, glaring fiercely at Jim's front door. Usually whenever I visit Jim, I have to knock carefully on his front door to avoid pulling my hand away with an additional dozen jagged splinters; his front door has been kicked in twice, once by the police and once by drug dealers, and his lazy effort to restore it hasn't ended well. Every time I see it, I go to remind him that it would be so easy to break into his house and steal everything he owns, but then a few things stop me; the most important of which being he a.) doesn't have anything that would fetch much worth, and b.) owns a handgun. Anybody who breaks into the house of James St Clare will leave with a bullet wound and the stuff they take with them won't even begin to foot the hospital bill.

The door opens then, making a horrific creaking noise as it does. I'm surprised it didn't fall apart under my hand when I hammered on it a few moments ago, how it doesn't completely crumble into a million pieces when James timidly pulls it open is a complete miracle. I see his dark brown eyes shine out from the tiny silver between the door and the wall, staring at me suspiciously. I sigh, and the sound is nearly a growl of frustration. "For God's sake man, you can _hear _my _voice_, you _know _that it's _me_!"

He swings open the door then and squints at the bright, grey light outside. He lifts up his arm to rub his eyes, and it's then I realise that he doesn't have a shirt on. I make a point of keeping my eyes fixed determinedly on his face; with nothing but time on his hands during his most recent stint in prison, he exercised, and the result is fairly impressive. Unfortunately enough.

His eyes refocus and find mine. He starts to smile, showing his surprisingly neat white teeth, made even whiter by his dark skin tone, but the steely look in my eyes quickly wipes the grin off of his face. He swallows nervously, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down, and he runs his hand through his thick, fluffy brown hair, still messy from sleep, even though it's three in the afternoon.

He knows why I'm here.

He sighs. "Niks, I haven't heard anything from him."

"Really?" I snap, bitingly. He blinks, taken aback by my sharpness. "So you haven't heard anything about the work under the tunnels?"

His face shuts down, just like Will's did when I asked him where he'd been, and Jim looks cold, cooler than ice. He steps more into the doorframe and shrugs, carefully avoiding my eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about," he says slowly, looking over my shoulder.

"So there's nobody down in the tunnels? You're not planning to join the rest of the guys from St Swithin's and move down there too?"

Jim's jaw clenches, but he still doesn't look at me. He lifts his arm up to rest on the doorframe and I realise he's trying to scare me. "I don't know what Will told you before he took off," Jim says, in a low voice. He finally meets my eyes and they blaze like fire. "And I don't know what you've heard, but I'll tell you now; you better be careful who you ask these questions. They ain't going to be as understanding as me; they've got people everywhere, Nikki, they'll know if you start asking questions."

"Understanding?" I almost laugh in his face, but I'm too mad for that. "_I _am just concerned about what our friend has gotten himself into. Or did you not hear about the goddamn _Police Commissioner _being _shot at _and _hospitalised _because of what's going on down there?! I do not give a rat's _ass _about whether or not you're understanding any more, Jim, I just want to make sure Will doesn't get himself killed down there."

"The only thing that's going to get him killed: is you," Jim snarls, his eyes flickering from mine to something behind me. I think he's scared someone's listening in. "And then you're going to get yourself killed. These are dangerous people, Nikki, and if they think you know something you shouldn't, they won't hesitate to kill you."

"Then _what am I supposed to do_?!" I scream, and then I clamp my lips shut, running my hands through my long brown hair. There are tears in the corner of my eyes and my feet are killing me in these heels, but I stand tall, avoiding Jim's eyes. I turn around for a moment to calm myself, and indeed there are people watching me; I suddenly feel overwhelmingly paranoid, like every one of them is a spy for the masked man underground, and I turn back, feeling deathly afraid. I'm now certain that I'm shivering because I'm terrified. "Jim, what am I supposed to do? Let Will go? Let him do something terrible for this guy who's running things down there, and end up getting himself killed? Or have him kill somebody else? He's not made for this stuff, Jim, he might think he can do it because he has no other option, but he can't."

Jim sighs, sadly. "I know. I know," he steps forwards, his arms spread out at the sides and, before I can stop him, he's wrapping his arms around me in a big hug, his sculpted torso pressed right up against me, his chin resting against my hair, his hands stroking my back soothingly. I feel my face flush bright red and I step out of the hug immediately.

There's a sly grin on his face when he releases me. "One day, you're going to get used to my sexy body being all pressed up against you and whatnot," he says with an over-exaggerated leer, and I have to laugh. He's good at making light of a bad situation.

And then I remember the bad situation, and my mood sours again. "Jim, we have to do something."

He grimaces. "Niks, I… I can't…"

A thought washes over me then and I stare at him in horror. "Are you… part of this too?"

"Not yet," he admits, and I'm hoping against hope he's being honest. "But it's getting hard to turn 'em down. The things they're offering… it's better than stealing."

"So's a real job."

Jim gives me a '_are you kidding_' look, and I scowl at him. "Has everybody you know signed up?"

"More or less."

"And all of you are okay with following this… underground Pied Piper around?" I say in disbelief. I don't realise how loud my voice has gotten until I hear it, over the whispering wind around me, and I see the look on Jim's face; his usually tanned skin is leeched of colour, his brown eyes popped open and staring in shock at something over my shoulder, his body going slack for a moment. I start to turn around, to see who it is that has overheard our conversation, but Jim grabs my forearm before I can look, stepping back through the door and yanking me with him, slamming it shut behind him in a move that makes the door shudder violently on its hinges. I have just enough time to take a quick peek around his apartment – at the small stolen TV fixed dangerously to the wall, at the long stolen couch that has random pockets of stuffing protruding out of it, at the pristinely clean red-white-and-black patterned rug just by my toes which is also a stolen item – before Jim swivels me round, plants his large hands on my shoulders and looks me dead in the eye. I've never seen him look so serious. Not even when me and Will went to visit him in prison. "Okay, here's what you're going to do," he says quickly, and I take it that there won't be time for me to make notes, or ask him to repeat. "You're going to go out the back door to this place and you're going to go back to your apartment and take whatever you can carry that won't weigh you down, and then you get out of there immediately, do you hear me? In, grab your stuff and then straight out, okay?"

My blood is ice in my veins and it pounds against my flesh painfully. "Wh-where am I supposed to go? I can't afford another place, everything I own is in there!"

Jim takes his hands off of my shoulders, his lips pursed, and he produces a mobile phone, also undoubtedly stolen. He scrolls through contacts, muttering constantly to himself all the while, and then hits the 'call' button, waiting not so patiently in front of the door, shoving me out of sight of the run-down, white-panelled window. He stares out of it every so often, twitching slightly, and then he starts barking into the phone. I stand there awkwardly, thinking over everything that he's said. _They won't hesitate to kill you_. And now, apparently, that's what they're going to do. Will they kill Will? Jim? Jesus.

Jim finishes talking a few moments later, hanging up without even a goodbye, tossing his phone onto the sofa as he scrambles around by the front door, in a pile of unread letters and bills scrunched up and tossed away. He storms past me into the kitchen, and I hear clattering around for a minute before he reappears, brandishing a pen like it's a sword. He grabs a random sheet of paper, scribbles something down in his hasty, small scrawl, and thrusts it at me, eyes wide and unblinking. "Go to this address and ask for Holly," he pauses for a second before giving me a ghost of a smile. "She'll try to rob you first, but she'll set you up with a place, _temporarily_."

"How temporarily?"

"Until I… until I can sort this out."

"How can you possibly sort this out?" I whisper hopelessly. His face crumples and he wraps an arm around me again, squeezing tightly. This time, I don't blush. I'm too scared for blushes. He chuckles weakly and drops a kiss on the top of my head.

"I'm charming like that," he says, unconvincingly.

"Somehow, I don't think that's going to work." I lean forward, grasping one of his hands between both of mine. "Come with me; if they've seen me, then they've seen you with me, you're going to be in trouble too, and I don't want you to get hurt."

Jim gives me a cocky smile and, right now, I want to punch him in his face. "I can take care of myself."

"You know, shockingly enough, that doesn't make me feel better."

"Worry about me later, worry about yourself now, now go!" he gives me another kiss on the head and then shoves me towards the kitchen, where the second way out is. I stumble awkwardly away from it, looking over my shoulder several times as I go. He gives me a sad smile and waves me away, looking out of the window as he does so.

I open the door and slip out, mouth set in a grim, determined line.

I'm sorry, Jim, but I'm not going to this apartment. I can't. I won't.

All the courage I was lacking earlier, when I was staring at the manhole willing myself to go down there and find Will, suddenly floods into me. Knowing that Will could be killed, that he could be _forced _to kill, because there's no way he would do it voluntarily, is worse than anything could happen to me down there. And if I can't go back to my apartment ever again, then there's only one place I want and should be going.

I am going down into the tunnels, and I am getting my best friend back.


	4. Chapter 4

Going back to my apartment is the single most terrifying experience of my entire life. I keep my head tucked down the entire way home, moving as quickly as is humanly possible in four inch heels, tucking my unruly mane of curls over my face to obscure my face a little more. Jim has got me seeing shadowy agents ruthlessly dogging me everywhere, and I physically cannot make myself lift my chin high enough to make eye contact with anybody; every time I try, my chest tightens up in an anaconda vice, and my breathing starts getting so fast I'm very nearly hyperventilating. It gets a little better after I cross over into the city centre, away from the New Narrows where everybody is desperate enough to be going underground and where the streets aren't quite as full of unseen twists and turns and darkened faces leering out from broken windows. But at least the New Narrows wasn't quite so _full _– the city centre is rammed with people, occupying every available cubic metre of the sidewalks, and it's suffocating. I have to shove a few times to push myself out of the stream, as the hyperventilating starts getting unbearably painful, but nobody notices. Gotham rarely pays attention to the little people on the streets, and I think this is the only day ever that I am glad for that fact.

I consider jumping in a cab and driving to my apartment, lest I've got pursuers on foot, but when I finally wrestle my way to the edge of the sidewalk and I put a suddenly clammy hand on the brazen yellow handle of the passenger door, I make the mistake of looking at the cab driver's face. A perfect normal, friendly face, but all I can hear is Jim's voice saying '_they've got people everywhere… they'll know_' and I am suddenly and completely convinced that this man is working against me, working to _kill me_, and I leap away from the cab with a whimper, withdrawing my hand and cradling it to my chest like it was scalding hot. I don't have time to see the driver's face, undoubtedly one of bemusement and confusion, before I start into a jog, slipping back into the faceless mass of people with newly found relief.

When I finally reach my apartment, I swear to God it's never looked as good as it does now.

I slam open the front doors with both hands, lurching forwards almost before the doors have opened. I nearly barrel into one of my fellow tenants, innocently collecting their mail from the inconveniently placed row of dull grey mailboxes right next to the entrance doors. The woman, a very old and very large woman clutching onto a chipped walking cane with every ounce of strength still left in her body, makes a squawking sound like a startled parrot and starts saying something in a voice not too unlike that of Beaker from the Muppets, but I ignore her, viciously kicking aside her dropped mail in a show of frustration, and I run past her. The elevator pings welcomingly for me, creaking open the rust-eaten doors and revealing the mirror inside, my own dishevelled and worn-out appearance running at me in a grotesque manner. I run past it, heading for the stairs. They always say '_in case of an emergency, use the stairs'_. This might not be entirely what they had in mind (then again, with this apartment block, I wouldn't be surprised).

I tackle the stairs as quickly as possible, quicker than I usually would; my apartment block, home as I have come to recognise it, is not a very nice place to live – the stairs are cold and grey and have the vague stink of urine and vomit constantly lingering around, and the hallways are so bare of any decoration or any interest in maintenance that I imagine there are prison cells that are more homely. It's why I was so determined to furnish my apartment to the rafters with any old pieces of junk that we could find. Will had objected at first – after he'd first moved in, bringing little but a box of clothes and several worn out pictures of him and the St Swithin's guys, he'd complained that my collection of oddities was like 'Helena Bonham Carter's tea room'. He'd quickly stopped objected when I set apart a shelf for empty alcohol bottles. He'd built up quite a collection and could, surprisingly enough, remember stories for all of them.

I look to that first when I reach my apartment, fumbling hurriedly with my keys and dropping them on my foot at least twice. I see the apple-green plastic cups we'd used for St Patrick's Day the first year we moved in; I see the comically large bottle of beer that Will won at a quiz at this cute, grotty little bar down the street from here; I see the two beer bottles that me and Will shared three years ago when we'd finished moving every small possession we'd ever owned into our even smaller apartment and we'd convinced the guys from the apartment opposite us to buy us some celebratory beers, the guys who we later discovered were growing marijuana from a plant pot we'd bought them for Christmas. I see all this, and I want to cry. Our lives had all the ingredients for being really, sadly terrible, but _I _didn't think it was so bad, purely because of Jim and Will and Josh, their other friend from St Swithin's. I have the wild urge to sweep all of the bottles into a bag and take them with me, but that would be impractical and I have no time for impracticalities right now. I am in very serious trouble.

I fly around the apartment like a crazed ghost, practically tearing my skirt and blouse off in my haste to get it off, shrugging into my more comfortable and more practical dark blue skinny jeans and simple white t-shirt. I pack the clothes I should take, reluctantly leaving behind every piece of genuinely nice, but definitely impractical clothes I have behind. Glad to be mourning over something as trivial as my favourite dress, I pack with more focus now, shoving the necessities into my black backpack, double and triple-checking when I think I'm finished.

It saddens me beyond words how my life can fit into such a small backpack.

My mobile starts buzzing as I'm about to finish, just gliding around the place one last time to make sure I didn't leave anything. I march over to it and pick it up without checking to see what the caller ID said.

"Okay, look." For one horrifying second I don't recognise the gravely voice on the other end and my heart nearly freezes in panic. And then, as the speaker splutters a very unhealthy sounding cough into the phone, so loud I can almost hear it as if he were standing next to me, I realise, with a shuddering sigh of relief, that it is Garry, my ever-charming landlord. I frown at nothing in particular. Garry, as always, has a knack for epically bad timing. "You ain't never caused me problems before, and you never brought the cops down on here or anything, and you're one of the only people not to cause me any problems, and I liked you for that, I really did."

"Well, Garry, I'm all choked up, that's real sweet of you, but-"

"But the cops are one thing, and the goddamn mob is another."

I put down my backpack and stay very still. "What are you talking about?"

Garry heaves a rasping sigh down the phone, like I'm an idiot. "You start bringing mob goons down on me, and you are going to be out on your ass, both of you are. I ain't stupid, I know you've got your homeless buddy sleepin' on your couch every night, but a homeless bum ain't hurting anybody; the mob's gunna bring more trouble than you are worth here. I don't have a problem with sending 'em away this time, I figure I owe you an' all, but next time, I am marching you out onto the street to meet 'em. Got it?"

"Loud and clear." I can't even feel myself speak.

"Rent's due in a week."

And with that, he's gone. As per usual.

My phone feels like a brick in my hand. _They're here. They're here_.

I have to swallow down a huge ball of panic before it can overwhelm me. _I can't panic. Not now. I have a job to do_.

I look over to the window by my bedroom door, the one with the rickety fire-escape sitting outside it, and, for the first time in a good few hours, a real smile crosses my lips. It's a good thing Jim gave me and Will lessons on good fire-escape etiquette. I always thought he was a little too paranoid. I make a mental note to thank him later.

(...)

Manoeuvring down the fire escape with the backpack strapped to my shoulders is a tad more difficult than the last time I shimmied my way down a ladder (after the first door-busting incident, Jim had taken me, Will and their friend Josh out to the severely unstable balcony bit acting as the middle ground between Jim's apartment and the rust-eaten fire escape, and had made us run drills with him, just in case he got another surprise visitor when we were visiting). Still, I manage to climb down with minimal fuss and only one slight injury, as the ladder unfortunately ends about seven feet before it hits the ground and I have to drop down awkwardly, landing shakily on my feet, sending a rattling sensation through my bones from the hard impact and almost dropping me to my knees. Some of my fellow residents had noted my assent downwards, and I look up to see a gaggle of small children staring down at me from a window about three stories up. I give them a thumbs-up, to let them know that I've landed relatively unharmed, but they don't react, staring almost unblinkingly at me in that impassive, unashamed way that children have.

More than a little creeped-out, I turn and start into a jog, enjoying the sensation of soft sneakers beneath my feet instead of high heels. I've never explored the area behind our apartment block before, and it takes a while for me to find my way back onto the street; the alleyways behind our block are filthy, dark, and oddly and uncomfortably warm, and littered with homeless people stooped over in doorways or in any nook and cranny they can squeeze into. They all stare at me as I jog past and I'm almost tempted to stop and give them the key to my apartment; I can't go back now, and there's food and water and clothes that I'm not planning to risk my life going back for. Still, the very threat of danger stops me: I don't know if the people from the tunnels will go back to my apartment to search for me, and they probably wouldn't have any qualms about attacking a gaggle of hungry homeless people that have suddenly sprung up in my place to find out where I've gone. So I push on, doing my best not to meet the eyes of any of the people staring blankly up at me, hoping that they'll forget my face the instant I sprint past them.

The address that Jim gave me is bunched up in my pocket, brushing against my leg insistently as I run, but I ignore it. Tempting as the offer is to go and hide out until it's all over, by that time, Will might be dead. And I can't take that risk. I won't.

Instead, I loop back to the New Narrows. If this is where this underground force is getting most of their workers from, there has to be an entrance somewhere nearby. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to get down there unseen, though; I purposefully packed one of Will's baseball caps, a faded dark blue-and-white number that was one of the first things he properly owned after some charity sent a bunch of things through to the orphanage, and I'm thinking of shoving it on and slipping in quietly amongst the recruited, pretending to just be another amongst their ranks. I don't know. I'll see when I get there. As soon as I cross over into the New Narrows, the streets slowly starting to get less and less well-kept, the people walking around looking more dishevelled and infinitely more desolate, I duck into an alleyway and pull the cap over my head, tucking my long brown hair into the top and shrugging on one of Will's hoodies, the thick grey jacket comically oversized on me. I don't look enough like a man to pass as one, so I'm hoping that they don't pay too much attention to me, or that they don't discriminate in where their workers come from. Looking nothing like the somewhat elegant young lady who had been speaking in such hushed tones with Jim earlier today, I continue onwards, shrugging the backpack over my shoulders again and walking on, head ducked down, face hopefully mostly obscured.

I'm about to head to Jim's house, to start my search from there, when luck strikes, and I notice a group of young men, all my age or a little older, huddled together and walking quickly, looking suspiciously around them. I look at their faces and my heart nearly stops. It's Josh, one of Will and Jim's friends, in the dead centre of the group: I recognise him immediately, since he's nearly six foot four in height, skinny as a bean pole, with a thick mass of dark brown hair and startlingly blue eyes. His eyes are ringed with thick black and he looks utterly defeated, following dutifully after the other boys with him. My heart squeezes painfully, and I feel so sorry for him that I could cry.

A little voice in the back of my head pipes up: '_they might not be going into the tunnels. It might be a dead end_'.

I hesitate, stood staring at them uncertainly as they start moving further and further away from me. They might not be going down into the tunnels, true... but I don't really know where else to start. And, if they're not going there, I can always corner Josh afterwards and interrogate him for the entrance. It beats wandering around the New Narrows in a state of confusion until someone who I don't want to find me finds me.

I start after them, following slowly, in a manner that I pray isn't too apparent that I'm tailing them. My heart is racing in my chest, and I feel so nervous that I feel sick, but I continue on.

_I'm coming, Will, I'm coming. Whether you're ready or not._


	5. Chapter 5

"This is the place?" Even from here, Josh's voice is thick with uncertainty. He rings his thin hands together nervously, twisting and turning them shakily, almost like he doesn't know he's even moving them. He glances around, his shaggy dark hair following him a heartbeat after he turns his head, and I have to duck behind the corner of the nearest building when his eyes scan over in my direction. I press my hands against the disintegrating brick wall and immediately retract them again, pursing my lips in a grimace of disgust, holding my hands just an inch or so off the wall in front of me. It's covered with a thick layer of grime that coats my hand in murky black dust as soon as I touch it and, if I were so inclined, I could pick off pieces of brick with my fingernails, it's so feebly held together. I don't know what this building used to house, but it's been a long time since anybody but homeless squatters set foot in there.

I get as close to the building as humanly possible without physically touching it, straining to overhear what they're saying.

"So I hear," one of them says, edging closer to the mouth of the alleyway, squinting down into it suspiciously. He snorts, leaning away again. "This is a bunch of crap, man, this is _bullshit_. There ain't nothing down there but bums, man, it sure as hell ain't gunna be Bane."

I frown, leaning a little closer despite the suspect substance clinging to the wall in front of me. Who the hell is Bane? The guy leading everybody underground?

"I don't know," another one of them sniffs, shuffling closer towards the alleyway to stand next to his friend. "Cops ain't gunna come sniffing around here if they're looking for him. Better to hide somewhere nasty and stay hidden than pick out a nice place and let the cops run right to you."

"He's got a point," one of the others agrees, leaning against the alley wall and nonchalantly crossing his arms. He looks totally at ease here. "'Course Bane could put himself up on a billboard and the cops still wouldn't last five minutes here. The New Narrows ain't exactly forgotten the old one," he adds on menacingly, and I feel a shudder go down my spine at the thought. This guy looks to be the oldest of the bunch, a few more world-weary lines etched onto his pale face, a few more dark whiskers dotting his chin. He'd remember the old Narrows with a fondness that it didn't deserve, especially in comparison to the state of the New Narrows, and he'd remember with all-too-perfect recollection just why the old Narrows had become the _old _version. I still have nightmares about it, even though I was only about ten at the time. I remember the screams of my neighbours as they'd attacked each other in frenzied confusion, and the roars of the prisoners who'd scrambled out of the Asylum, cackling gleefully as the madness-gas had only served to heighten their insanity. And, of course, I remember my mother; my last ever memory of her consisting of her shrieking like a banshee and recoiling from me as the madness descended, to the point where she had grabbed one of her ancient frying pans and had screamed at me to '_go back to hell before I send you back to Satan myself, demon_'. It was the same day I met Will. Under unfortunately similar circumstances.

I'd never blamed the police for what had happened to me, to how my life and the lives of countless others had been destroyed that day – Jonathan Crane did that, he was the one who'd released the gas, the papers said, I committed his name to memory – but there were others, lots more others, who held the cops responsible for not putting a stop to Crane's plans before he could unleash them. I guess this guy here was one of those people.

The hushed voices of the group bring me back to the moment.

"What if it's a trap, guys?" I recognise Josh's voice now; his usually deep voice is twisted and high with concern. He's a good guy, _truly _a good guy. He must recognise that this is wrong. He must. "I mean, everyone around here's heard of him, right? This could be some guys who say they know how to get to him, but they're just gunna take all our stuff and then shoot us."

One of the group snorts derisively. "Princess, do you really think anybody's gunna risk bringing _Bane _down on their heads? He'd _destroy _'em. Y'know," the speaker's voice turns excited, suddenly almost childlike in its wonder, and I am reminded of the girls in the office, gossiping about Bruce Wayne. "Tommy from the docks told me Bane crushed a man's skull in for refusing him, once. Popped it, like a watermelon."

"You can't pop a man's head, Joel, ya dumbass."

"Says who?"

"Says reality."

"Shut up, man, you don't know. 'Sides, if anybody could do it, it'd be Bane. The guy's built like a tank, from what I heard. He spent years in a China prison, fighting every man who got sent inside and keeping their heads as trophies under his bed."

"I thought you said he popped the heads."

"_No, jackass, _I said he popped _one _guy's head. Why would he keep popped heads under his bed, Matt, think it through."

"Guys, could you cut it out?" Josh said loudly, and, though I can't get a clear shot of his face, I can just picture it. Almost grey in complexion, his eyes all wide and unfocused like they were on the day that Will got back from this part-time shift he'd found at a slaughter house, and he was graphically describing his brutal day's work in order to try and make Josh sick.

I hear more suppressed laughter. "Man up, princess, you're gunna be doing a lot worse than popping heads with Bane," one of them cackles sinisterly, and the others follow suit. A chill rolls over my body. _Will, what have you gotten into_?

"Maybe this wasn't such a good idea," Josh groans, and I hear scuffed footsteps staggering closer to me. I fade further into the alley, not wanting to be spotted.

The group is quiet now. "What's that mean?" one barks. "You backing out?"

"Maybe we all should!" Josh shouts, desperately. "I mean…" he pauses, breathing heavily. "C'mon, guys. _Popping heads_? You really think you can do that, for _money_? You really think you can look a guy in the eye, say 'sorry, pal' and kill him?"

A thoughtful silence descends on the group for a moment before one of them pipes up meekly. "See, I still don't think it's possible for you to-"

"_I know it's not possible for you to squish a head, Matt, I get it_!" Josh snaps, kicking at something metallic in frustration; it topples to the floor with a loud clatter, rolling around noisily. Josh heaves a heavy sigh and then growls under his breath. "You guys really think you can do this?"

The awkward silence then gives me hope. _Make the right choice, guys. Don't do it._

"But… we have to," one of them says uncertainly. "We don't have any other choice."

A grunt of agreement passes round the group, and one of the speakers gets more bold. "Fact of the matter is, princess: if we don't do this, we're screwed. There ain't nothing for us 'cept stealing, and your buddy Jimmy doesn't seem to be doing too well in that business these days. You've seen him, when's the last time he brought something in actually something worth sellin'?" The speaker waits the length of a breath for Josh to respond and then continues on confidently. "He ain't got _shit_. Just like us. If he's got any sense, he'll be crawling here tomorrow. _Now_. Ladies. Can we please go see what's what?" There's another pause. "Princess, feel free to pussy out, if you don't want Bane to pop your head," he says bitterly and then I hear footsteps, one set at first, confidently striding down the alleyway, and then more, all humbly shuffling after the first one.

I edge closer to the side of the wall and peek round, hoping against hope.

Josh is stood frozen, staring after his friends with wide confused blue eyes, and I feel my heart spring happily in my chest. I stare intently at him, willing him to walk away with every fibre in my being. _Walk away, Josh, please walk away, walk away, Josh, please_…

He starts to turn around, to walk away, and then he stops. His eyes are twitching slightly from side to side, like he's thinking furiously. He does this for a few moments and then stops, eyes still, body still, barely even breathing.

And then he sighs. His shoulders sag and it's like someone deflated him with a balloon.

He turns back to the alley and walks after his friends, his feet kicking against the crumbling concrete like he's being forcefully dragged down into the darkness.

I feel all the hope leech out of me in that instant, and my own shoulders droop in defeat. They really think they have no hope. No other option, nothing without this man. How has he done this? How has Bane managed to convince them that his way is the only way? He's turned everyone against what's right, what's good, and has them thinking that everything's going to get better for them.

Goddamn him. Goddamn him entirely.

I wait a few minutes to make sure that they won't hear me coming, and then I start after them, trying to keep a cool and casual pace, clutching the straps of my backpack with an iron grip, ducking my head down enough to conceal my face whilst leaving enough room for me to examine my peripheral vision. The alley is so dark it's like someone extinguished the sun in this part of Gotham, and it's cold, colder than I thought it would be. I tighten the hoody around me, feeling my bones tremble from the cold. There are no windows on either side of the alley and it makes me feel like I'm in a walled-off cell. Anxiety kicks in again and I have to slow my breathing purposefully, in case I start hyperventilating. I can't look so terrified in front of those people down there. They'll know me for a fraud and then they'll kill me.

After what seems like an eternity of cold, dark concrete, the alley ends and, down the right pathway, there's a small dim light at the end, so faint that it's like a mirage and I'm looking at it through a haze of gas fumes. I tread cautiously towards it, glancing up every so often to check above me, looking over my shoulder just as much to make sure that there's nobody boxing me in. Still, the hairs on the back of my neck shiver like someone's watching me and I have a cool feeling pooling in my stomach, like someone's injected numbing fluid straight into me. It's not a pleasant sensation and I curse Bane all over again for causing this mess in the first place.

Gradually, the end of the pathway starts to form a coherent shape, in the form of what looks like a wooden shack; the walls are made up of rotting light wood and the roof is little more than a pile of bricks carelessly dumped on top of several unsteady beams of wood. This was a place put together in a hurry, and I understand that, of all the things that he's doing now, constructing this was probably not high on Bane's priority list. Especially since he lives underground and everything.

I hear murmured voices again, though the words are unclear, and I slow my pace to little more than a crawl, fighting the desire to turn tail and run, as fast as humanly possible, out of here, out of the New Narrows, out of _Gotham _until I'm as far away as possible. Nothing good lives here. Nothing good can come of it, nothing.

I grit my teeth and press on. _You've not come all this way, to now turn around and say 'I'm out'. Man up_.

I hover outside until the voices start to fade, echoing faintly. _The entrance to the tunnels is here_, I realise with a start, that's what I can hear echoes. My hands tingle. I'm so close, I'm almost excited.

When the voices are almost completely gone, I edge inside, peering round nervously. Surprisingly, it's not just one room – there's an archway leading into another room, a room that's lit up by a harsh clinical white light. In this first room, there's little to no furniture at all, with the only exception being a lightly coloured wooden chair sitting by the archway. The walls and floor are completely bare, just the same ill-treated wood that forms the walls, and the only occupant is a man sitting in the wooden chair by the archway. He's a big man, a _very big man_, with a bouncer's heavyset built and height, and beady little eyes that narrow with instinctive suspicion when they latch onto me. He takes in the ratty state of my clothes, scuffed and dirty from both the jump from my building's fire-escape and brushing up against the walls around the Narrows, but his suspicion doesn't dilute at all. It's also apparent that he knows I'm a woman from the way he runs his eyes up and down my body, knowing perfectly well that I can see him doing such and not caring even slightly. This makes my temper flare up a little, and it makes it a lot easier to march up to him with my attitude riled.

I jut my jaw out, meeting his cool grey gaze with a fierce glare. "This where I can sign up?" I ask quietly. I don't bother specifying for what. He already knows what I mean. Why I'm here.

He leans back in his chair and studies me again. He nods at my backpack. "What's in there?" His voice is incredibly deep, even for a man. He looks like the complete opposite of a jazz musician, but sounds exactly how you'd imagine one to sound.

I slowly slip off the straps of my bag and lower it to the floor. "Clothes, a bit of food, water, some keepsakes I took when I left my apartment," I say, thankful that I'm allowed to answer honestly. "I've got no interest in going back there again."

The guard looks up from my bag back to my face. "You from around here?"

"Not from here," I answer cagily. He narrows his eyes even more, evidently not pleased with my answer. "Where then?" he demands, and again, I'm thankful I can answer honestly. "I used to live in the Narrows. West Street?"

His eyes flare wider in recognition that I wasn't expecting. I'm not sure if this is good news or not. "You lived on West Street?" I nod. "The Bale apartment block?" I nod again eagerly. "I lived there with my mom," I answer, unable to help the mournful sound that seeps into my voice as I mention my mother. Her face floods my mind again and I feel a lump begin to form in my throat.

The guard gives me a sympathetic look. "She get the madness-gas?"

"She tried to kill me with a frying pan," I answer back, my voice flat and as cold as ice. I don't like talking about my mother, and I especially don't like talking about her with a random stranger. "I'm assuming it was the madness-gas."

The guard grunts once, and I think it was supposed to be a laugh. "She get sent to Arkham with the rest?"

"No, she didn't." I don't volunteer the rest and he doesn't ask. I continue on, feeling a surprising amount of rage bubbling in my chest as I speak. "I can't be part of this any more. This place… it's poison," I spit, shaking my head from side to side vehemently. "And I can't afford to get out and start somewhere new. Hell, I can't afford _anything_… and I hear this is the place where I can change that."

The guard stares at me impassively, and I stare back, breathing heavier than before, feeling a little troubled now. The words I just spoke, I don't necessarily think were lies… if I had enough money to leave Gotham, you'd be damn sure I would be on the next flight out. This city _is _poisonous. All the stuff that's happened here, all the madness that's taken over this city… you'd have to be crazy, broke or too comfortable to stay in such madness, and I fit the second option.

I briefly wonder just how committed I am to staying out of this work force.

And then I internally shake myself. _They're dangerous. And the word 'dangerous' in Gotham City means deadly. _

The guard nods at me then and stands up. He towers over my five foot four inches, a good foot or even more taller than me, and my throat goes dry. I guess the time for running out of the room is gone. He shouts for somebody named Jacob, and looks down at me. I feel like a tiny child next to this man, and I'm sure this is an intentional move. To make me feel small. "Jacob will take you down with the others. If you cause trouble, he'll have no problem killing you. Are we clear?"

I nod vigorously, heart beating like a jack hammer. _Note to self: don't piss off Jacob_.

The guards studies my face again and then points a meaty finger at my backpack. "That can't go downstairs with you. That stays up here with me."

I nod again, wondering where all the nerve I had a moment ago disappeared to.

I hear footsteps then, clanging echoing footsteps, and then a figure appears, a young Hispanic man who's only a good few inches taller than I am; his eyes are as dark as ink, almost as dark as his thin layer of hair, and he observes me with as little interest as you'd give a car in the street. He looks blankly at the guard and the guard nods back. "Stand still," Jacob commands and starts to pat me down. I stare determinedly at the bare wall above Jacob's head, clenching my jaw so hard my teeth hurt a little. After a minute, Jacob stands back up and nods. "She's good," he tells the guard beside him, who really couldn't have cared any less - he waves a hand carelessly in my direction and then plants himself back into his seat, collapsing onto the chair with a heavy sigh. The chair groans in pain under his weight.

"Let's move," Jacob grunts, already starting back into the room he'd literally just walked out of. I scuttle after him obediently, meeting the guard's eyes one last time before he disappears behind the wall. I focus my attention back on Jacob and the room around me, slamming to a halt as Jacob comes to an abrupt stop right in front of me. He swivels round to face me and it takes me a minute or two longer than it should have for me to realise that he's descending a ladder. There's a hole surgically ripped into the floor, a neat four-by-four hole. I can't see anything in the hole itself, save for the shiny silver ladder sticking out of the top. Jacob disappears further and further down the ladder until I can't see him at all, only his uninterested shout of encouragement reaches me.

I nudge the ladder apprehensively with the tip of my shoe and it doesn't even flinch. At least the thing's secure.

I take a deep breath and descend into the darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

_Good day to any and all reading! I hope you're enjoying it so far. I'm enjoying myself immensely with this story; after seeing the Dark Knight Rises (twice is still not enough, unfortunately; it's surpassed Batman Forever as my favourite Batman film. And, yes, Batman Forever was my favourite over the Dark Knight. I don't know how, or why, it was just pure brilliance. I imagine I just lost myself a lot of readers for that :D) I became obsessed with it, and, after struggling to think of a Fanfic story, I came up with this and ran with it. :)_

_But, yeah, bad news. Well, kind of. I'm off to Greece for 2 weeks with my ever-charming family, so there'll be no updates, unfortunately. I hope you guys can wait that long. In the mean time, I'm finally introducing Bane into this chapter (I am officially in love with Tom Hardy. It's ridiculous. He's replaced Chris Hemsworth as my obsession of the moment, and that is no mean feat) and I'm hoping he fits with the one in Nolan's films. I toyed with the idea of making a Bane/OC thing going on, but I like my Bane menacing and sadistic and just a bit of a monster. I'm hoping he's sufficiently terrifying. :)_

_Anyway, rant over. Mostly. Thank you to the reviews already written down, and thank you to the people who read this. I've written Fanfiction before and whatnot, but being told that my stuff isn't terrible is the best feeling in the world, so thank you very much. :)_

_Enjoy!_

Our journey through the tunnels is silent, save for the metallic echoes of our footsteps, resonating through the slim stretch of endless grey in a rhythmic beat that sounds like a battle drum. My guide offers me no conversation and I extend him the same courtesy. He's obviously as uninterested in getting to know me as I am in getting to know him, and I'm perfectly fine with this. The quiet gives me the opportunity to look around, to take mental notes; I'll be the first to admit that I don't really have too much of a plan right now aside from 'get in, find Will, get out', and tracking down an easily accessible escape route would be handy. At least there's more lighting now that we're further down the corridor. When I'd climbed down the ladder, I literally could not see an inch in front of my face, relying purely on the sound of Jacob's brisk footsteps clattering away from me to have any sense of where I was going. I'd extended my palm out, to make sure I didn't go mindlessly blundering into a wall, and I'd jogged after Jacob quickly, not wanting to get left behind. I mean, I didn't exactly want to carry on further into the tunnels either, but the idea of being stranded in the suffocating darkness, to choose between trying to creep back past the huge guard or to find my own way through the grey underground labyrinth had been such a truly disturbing idea that, when I reached Jacob, I'd felt the childlike urge to wrap my fingers through his and hold on tightly. I look over at Jacob now, all tense muscles and hunched shoulders, and the idea of him holding my hand and skipping gleefully towards Bane makes me smile a little. I'm half-tempted, just to see what he'd do in response, but something tells me I could end up losing a hand, and I intend to re-emerge from this desolate place with all of my limbs perfectly intact.

Whether this will actually happen, though, is unfortunately and highly uncertain.

As we continue on, I wonder just how Jacob knows where he's going. It all looks worryingly exactly the same to me, it's almost like we're going in circles. Just the exact same barren, dull grey walls, floor and ceiling, the same clinical electrical lighting, and the threatening-sounding thud of our footsteps. I keep close to Jacob, looking around edgily. There are so many dark corners I can't see into, so many shadows of ink black that could very well be hiding a human being, silent and watchful guards that stay hidden always, revealing themselves only when someone tries to creep in. Or out. This idea unnerves me more than words can say, and I have to take deep breaths to steady myself, to stop the shaking.

Eventually, after what appears to be an endless, maddening slab of concrete, I hear voices, lots of voices. We turn another corner and at the end of this new corridor, the light is a lot brighter. Still not particularly bright, but after traipsing around in near-dark for what must be about twenty minutes now, I still have to squint and cup my hand over my eyes to shield my face a little. Jacob, however, is completed unperturbed and continues forward at the same pace, if not a little quicker now. I'm not sure if it's because he's eager to get out of the thick darkness or because he's itching to rid himself of my company. Either way, it doesn't matter. He's gotten me where I needed to go. I start thinking about what I have to do next, and I almost wish we were still walking through those endless tunnels. At least then I still had time to prepare, time to think. There's no time left now, and I feel so totally and utterly unprepared that my knees start shaking beneath me. _You've not come all this way, to now turn around and say 'I'm out'. Man up_.

My eyes start adjusting to the harsh glare of the lights in front of me and the room directly ahead slowly starts taking form, blurred slightly like I'm looking at a mirage. There are people packed from wall to wall, all huddled together with their heads bowed like they're in communal prayer. The room isn't particularly large either, small and compact, and the small space makes the people look even more hunched over. There's not a splash of colour on anybody, just a blend of off-whites, faded black and dirty grey. And not a single smile either: everybody looks so completely and utterly hopeless, it's like looking at a colony of survivors of a post-apocalyptic disaster. Only a few raise their heads to study me as I go past and even then, the looks on their faces don't resemble any sort of alert expression; they examine me blankly, their eyes lingering on me for a second before dropping back down again. They've obviously seen such an endless parade of people trudge obediently past them that it long ceased to be interesting. I meet the eyes of a few of the watching, and then I can't manage it any more without feeling empty deep inside my chest. Their eyes are so lifeless and their complexions so sallow and sickly that, if I couldn't visibly see their chests rising and falling, they'd look little more than corpses. Is this Bane's master army? All these people? If Bane is hoping to stoke them into a passionate rage, to fight against the cops, he's going to have a job on his hands. His _army _is more like a horde of zombies.

In the corner of the room are the only people who look vaguely self-aware, and these are the people dressed in thick black padding, _armour. _Each of them has a light, sand coloured harness attached to their waists and each harness is kitted out with a variety of treats – long, sharp daggers at least as long as my forearm; small black baubles that I realise with a nauseous jolt are hand grenades; and sleek black handguns, glistening like oil under the light, strapped handily to their hips for quick access. I've seen guns before, but looking at them now is different. These are guns for killing innocents. For killing _police officers_. Somewhere in this building stands the man that shot Commissioner Gordon and the gun that fired the bullet will be nestled snugly against his body. Does Will have a gun like this? A harness like this attached to him right now? The idea of Will, Will who is one of the clumsiest people I've ever met, Will who once cut himself on a pair of _safety scissors_, walking around with this set of tools is literally one of the worst things I could ever have imagined.

I glance around, looking for Josh as we walk. He wasn't too far ahead, he could be nearby. I'm just not sure if that would be a good thing or not.

Jacob walks past the armed men, giving them a curt nod as he does so. I duck my head, feeling my cheeks flame as all of them stare brazenly at me, following my movements with keen eyes. I'm betting this has something to do with me being a woman and a woman who is dressed well, especially in comparison to the other few women here. I hear one of them mutter something to the others, prompting a round of throaty chuckles, and I flush even harder. It was ridiculous to think I wouldn't be noticed here. I'm just hoping one of them doesn't start looking too intently at me. Even more intently than they already are.

I'm too busy staring at the floor, trying to hide my red face from the armed men, to notice that Jacob has stopped abruptly in front of me. He holds up a well-toned arm and it bumps into my stomach, drawing my attention up again. I meet his eyes for a moment, surprisingly beautiful eyes the colour of rich hazel, and then the world around him catches my eye.

My mouth pops open and I let out an involuntary gasp, completely oblivious to the stares of the armed men now.

The room is unbelievably large, cavernous. It could easily be the size of one of the smaller office towers in the city centre and it's just as wide, an uneven cylinder in a missile shape. There's sturdy gating everywhere, running around the cave in dizzying circles, ladders and chunky silver chains dangling from everywhere. A huge waterfall sits in the centre of the cave, pouring down in huge white waves, further down than I would care to look. The sound of the water tumbling down through the cave is deafening – it's hard to hear anything else, I note with a spark of hope. There are people everywhere: up at the very top of the cave, examining the oddly smooth grey ceiling; walking slowly around the room at a leisurely pace, absent-mindedly running their hands over the copper-coloured railings in front of them; small groups of people standing together, talking amongst themselves. Not one of these people looks familiar to me. I scan the faces I can see, for Josh and for Will, but I can't see either of them. There aren't as many people as I thought and feared there might be; on the walk here, I'd got the image of thousands squatting down here, all angry and vengeful against the people on the surface, but, at most, I'd guess about three hundred. And half of those don't even look interested enough to take arms against another. They just look defeated.

"When they call, you come down here and you wait, got it?" Jacob asks in a low growl, not even bothering to make eye contact with me as he speaks. He doesn't acknowledge my nod; either that or he doesn't care. "Don't do anything stupid. And whatever you do," he adds, meeting my eyes for a length of a heartbeat before looking quickly away. He points across the cave, angling his arm downwards slightly. I follow his arm and stare at the corner of the next floor down. It looks like a cell without the walls: there's a bed jammed right up against the corner, covered in a hospital-white sheet, with an intense looking machine looming behind it, several tubes dangling patiently down by the sides of the bed. I frown at Jacob, uncomprehending. "You don't go over there. Not once. Understood?"

_That must be where Bane sleeps_, I realise with a jolt. I nod slowly back, keeping my eyes on that small area. I vaguely note Jacob walking away, muttering something darkly under his breath as he goes, but the main focus of my attention is on the small room. I walk forwards and, as I approach the railing, I notice a figure standing by a small black desk pushed right up against the wall a few feet away from the bed, his back turned to me. I come to a stop against the rails, eyes riveted to the man. Even from here, I can tell he's huge – he has nothing on the upper half of his body and his muscles are enormous, built up to a powerful perfection, and I remember what one of Josh's friends said earlier. _He spent years in a China prison, fighting every man who got sent inside… _Maybe some of the rumours are true. He sure as hell looks like a fighter.

There's something attached to his head, something that I can't see properly. It's jet black, and it runs down the middle of his hairless head, covering the lower half of his head and curving around to his jaw. Maybe it's a kind of mask? Like a vigilante? I think of the only other masked vigilante in Gotham – or that _used _to be in Gotham – and I frown. The Batman and Bane don't really fit into the same category. Granted, they've both killed people, as the news reports on Harvey Dent delighted in informing me, but still. Batman wasn't all bad. It was he who stopped Crane, stopped the madness-gas from taking hold of most of Gotham. Even if he did get there too late to stop Crane from ruining my life.

I'm still thinking about Crane and my mother when Bane turns around and I get the full glimpse of his mask. It covers about three quarters of his face, so that only his eyes and the sides of his head are really visible. The piece covering his mouth and nose curl in, dark claws curving towards the space where his mouth should be. It looks more intricate than for just mere theatrics, and there doesn't seem to be a clasp to unbuckle it from his head, almost like it's screwed onto his skull.

I'm frowning even deeper, trying to figure out how exactly he manages to _eat _– maybe through those tubes near his bed – when he looks up, and just happens to look directly at me, like he knows I've been standing there, staring at him. Every muscle in my body tenses and my grip on the railing in front of me gets so tight my arms are shaking. I'm dimly aware of the fact that my breathing is getting heavier, like I'm breathing through tar in my lungs, but I physically cannot drag my eyes away from his. They're a startlingly piercing blue, bluer than I've ever seen, but you'd be an idiot to call them beautiful. They're _cruel_ – cruel and alert and appraising me with a terrifyingly strong intensity. Amusement sparkles in his gaze and he cocks his head slightly to the left, not breaking eye contact with me for a moment. He may look amused, but it's not a reassuring, happy type of amusement. It's sadistic; like he's contemplating pulling off all my limbs as slow as if peeling the wings off an insect, and he relishes the idea.

_This is not a hero of the downtrodden and the repressed, this man is evil_.

The certainty of this statement is bone-deep in me, and I wonder how on Earth Will and all of these people ever thought this Bane was here to help them.

Bane is still staring at me unflinchingly. His curiosity frightens me all over again: of all the people in this place, Bane is the _very last person _who I should be attracting the attention of. I remember one of Josh's friends talking about Bane popping a man's head and, looking at him now, I do not doubt it in the slightest.

Bane takes a step forward then, still not breaking eye contact with me, and this is what it takes for me to finally move, flinching off of the railing like there's a live electric current running through it. He pauses as I jerk away in fear, and I get the vague sense that he knows how scared I am, how afraid he makes me, and I also get the disturbing feeling that that's exactly how he wants me to feel. Intimidated and scared worse than I've ever felt before, even more than when my own mother was driven mad.

He starts walking again, always _always _keeping his unnaturally blue eyes on my face, and I get the horrible feeling he's coming for me. _He's coming for me_.

I back away from the railing and start walking as quickly as possible away from him, my urge to find Will intensified.

I have to find Will before Bane finds me.


	7. Chapter 7

_So, I'm heading off on holiday in literally half an hour, but I wanted to write another chapter before I leave. I've put more work into this than I have into packing. My mother is not amused. :D I apologise if there are some mistakes, I haven't really had the time to go back and check. _

_So, enjoy reading, thanks for the reviews again, they make me very happy indeed. Leave some more reviews if you want, and I'll try to read them over the next 2 weeks. I'll be obsessively checking the internet on my phone for updates anyway, even if it wastes all my credit. :D _

_Stay beautiful, and see you in two weeks! Hang in there with me until then. :) :)_

_Gotta find Will. Gotta find Will. Gotta find Will._

Not for the first time, I hear someone snarl "Watch it!" as I almost barrel into them. I'm trying to keep my head down and walk on, trying not to attract any more attention than I've already earned myself (_stupid, stupid, stupid, __**stupid**_) but, every time I move my eyes forward and start almost jogging up and around the grating (_can't go down there, Bane's down there, can't go down there_), I can feel him right at my back, towering above me, fixing me with those horrible eyes, fingers twitching in anticipation of the head popping that comes next. And then, as soon as that image of Bane standing directly behind me like a vengeful demon, I whip my head back around, hearing my heartbeat slamming away in my ears, my breath leaving me in quick shaky bursts, and I can't bring myself to face forwards again, to turn my back to him, even though I've lost sight of him now. And then I almost crash into someone, and I repeat this unnerving little cycle. Tears are pooling into my eyes and I feel frustrated, so frustrated that I'm on the very edge of giving up and high-tailing it out of this godforsaken places as quickly as the Roadrunner, but my fear of Bane is only amplifying my need to find Will. _I have to get Will away from him, I have to._

I bound up the steps to the next level, immediately glancing down to see if I can see Bane. The fact that I can't is worse than if I met his gaze again, and I leap up the metal steps in increased haste. I start patrolling the upper level, the level just under the one at the very top, and I'm scanning the eyes of every man that crosses my path with a mechanical efficiency that makes me feel like the Terminator. As soon as I discern that the man in front of me is not Will, they become almost invisible, no longer of any interest at all. I'm almost tempted to stop and ask one of them if they've seen him, but that would be making myself known to another of these people, and I have absolutely no intention of letting that happen.

There's a gap in the wall a little further ahead of me, where dusty looking men keep crawling out of, all wearing the same sandy coloured harness that I saw earlier. I stop as I get to the opening and peer down it, having to squint again to see anything. The corridor in front of me is long and thin, with just enough room to fit one broad person in the aisle without difficulty, and it's very poorly lit, a singular orange light hanging limply from the dead centre of the corridor. There are doorways lining the corridor, thin rectangles of netted grating forming each archway. I step forwards into the corridor, turning to look at the first of these rooms, putting a hand on the doorframe. The room itself is tiny, just big enough to fit a stunted single bed and a toilet, exactly how you'd imagine a prison cell to look like; the bed is stripped of all its linens aside from a murky grey cover sheet, with only one hard-looking flat pillow at its head, and the toilet, though it looks barely used, looks filthy, probably never been cleaned. Just looking at it makes my skin crawl. There's nobody in it, but I gage that it's been taken already, judging by the rumpled state of the bed sheet and the indentation in the pillow. Rooms for the workers? My heart jumps in my chest. _Will will have one of these. I've just got to find it._

The first corridor brings me no luck. I glare blindly in at every room, hoping to see Will sat there, staring back with a shocked expression on his face at my presence, but, instead, I get accusing scowls shot back at me, barely visible eyes narrowing at me from out of the dark. I don't find a trace of Will, nothing from the dozens of rooms built into this stretch of corridor. When I reach the end of the corridor, shoulders sagging a little, I notice a flight of stairs leading up to the next level. I pause just before walking up them, looking back to the corridor where I just came from.

There's a monstrous shadow standing at the opposite end of the corridor.

I race up the stairs, taking them two at a time even though I'm exhausted when I reach the top. There's a new corridor right by the top of the stairs and I dive into it, increasing my tempo now. My footsteps banging against the grating sound much louder than they should, and I keep turning around to see if Bane's there, walking with deliberately slow menace up the stairs, playing with me before he catches me. I almost forget to look into the rooms to check for Will and I have to double back at one point to check to see if I've missed him. The young man in there gives me a hostile, quizzical look, and I leave him be, head already whipping to the other side to check the other room.

My heart sinks as I near the end of the corridor. I'm at the very top of the cave, right where I could see those workers examining the ceiling, and there wasn't another set of stairs descending downwards on the level below me to indicate more rooms, so these must be the last sets of rooms available, and I still haven't seen any sign of Will. I'm not sure what time it is, not even able to hazard a guess. There are a lot of people in the cells, all looking forlorn and angry and tired, but I don't know if that means it's day or night; night time would be the more logical time for an underground organization to go about its business, so they might be resting during the day to prepare themselves for the night's work. I just don't know.

I glance in yet another room, one of the last few ones along this corridor, and I almost continue onwards when something lurches in my stomach, and I realise with a jolt that I recognise something in that cell. There's nobody in it, unfortunately, but there's a hoody lying across the bed in an almost neat way, a simple navy blue hoody a light grey inner lining, and I recognise it as Will's, as something I bought him only a few months ago. I'd complained to him when it had started getting bitterly, wintery cold that he didn't have a thick jacket to keep him warm. His response – 'It's fine, I'm not sort of woman, you know' – had been cancelled out by the raw redness of his arms from where the cold had struck him. I'd clenched my jaw, put my foot down and bought him a hoody from a local sports shop that's run by an old friend of my mother's, who always gives me a sympathetic smile and, most importantly of all, a discount. I'd bought him that hoody, the one sitting right there, only a few feet away from me now.

This is Will's cell. This is his new home now.

I step inside, absentmindedly pulling the baseball cap off of my head and letting my hair fall loose around my shoulders. I let the hat dangle loosely between my fingertips and I slowly lower myself onto Will's bed, keeping my back to the door. There's nothing else in his cell but this hoody. I try to think back to see if he was wearing it the last time I saw him, in that coffee shop, but the memory won't come to me. It feels like a year ago. Years. I carefully lift it up and run my fingers against the fabric. It evens smell like him, like that Old Spice stuff that Josh bought him for his last birthday, and he'd spent the entire day leaping out at me from random corners, screeching 'Look away, now look back at me,' re-enacting the whole commercial a ridiculous amount of times. I'd even heard him whispering it from the other room when I was trying to sleep.

I smile faintly to myself at the memory of me threatening to destroy the cologne just to get him to stop. I hear someone say something behind me, in a distant voice, but I don't hear what they're saying. I'm not even afraid of Bane at this moment in time: I'm stuck in the past, recalling how much I'd laughed when Jim had leapt on Will for repeating the Old Spice advert for the hundredth time, how Will was still howling out the words to the advert even as they'd scuffled on the floor in front of me. I'd taken advantage and used them as a feet-prop, an action which neither of them appreciated very much.

"Hey!" the voice is a lot louder now, coming from right behind me. It breaks through my happy reverie like a bucket of cold water to the face, and fear stills my heart. I know it's not Bane – I'm not sure how I know, but I know it isn't him – but the image of him standing behind me, his face a mask of darkness save for those twin pools of icy fire, returns with a force and I can't bring myself to turn around, to face him. The idea of those eyes, so close, only a few inches away from my face…

"Alright, jackass, you've got exactly three seconds to get out of my _fucking room _before I throw you out my fucking-" the voice starts saying. I feel a large hand on my shoulder, forcefully dragging me around to look at him, and then I am looking into hard brown eyes, darkly set into a pale face half covered by unruly dark curls. His black eyebrows move from furrowed anger to numbing shock, and his small brown eyes widen like saucers, so that I can see the caramel colour mixed in with dark chocolate brown.

"Niks?"

The man in front of me speaks with Will's voice, but he doesn't say it with Will's lips, on Will's face. His face looks gaunt, sallower, like he hasn't been eating well. Angry dark circles ring his eyes and there's a vicious purpling bruise just above his eyebrow. His beard has been trimmed, but hastily, sloppily, and it gives him the look of a wild man, in comparison to his old lumberjack-style black beard. His body looks skinnier too, unhealthily so, his clothes hanging off of him a little.

It takes me a moment to recognise my best friend.

When it finally clicks, I sigh. _Finally_.

I launch myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck so tightly I'm probably choking him a little. His arms wrap around my waist, hugging me to him, and I can feel the bones in his elbow protruding a little. I step back and study him for a minute. His face is lit up, and he looks like Will again.

I smile back, feeling relaxed for the first time in a long time.

And then I slap him. Hard. Round the face.

He stares at me bewildered, his face reddening quickly.

"You absolute dick," I growl, slapping his arm now. "You absolute, utter _douchebag_!" I hiss, slapping his arm with both of my hands now, glowering furiously up at him. He's a good seven or so inches taller than me, yet he still looks completely crestfallen at my angry expression. "I'm sorry!" he says quietly. "I'm sorry, Niks, I'm so sorry I left without saying goodbye…"

"You should be sorry just for leaving, you dumbass," I snap. I didn't realise quite how angry I am with him. "How could you come down here and join _him_?! Have you seen him?! That's not some sort of Robin Hood, Will, he's _dangerous_, and he's evil. How can you follow a man like that?!"

"I don't know," he whispers brokenly. He moves away from me and sits down on the bed, shoulder slumped, hands running through his hair. He looks up at me pleadingly. "They shot the Commissioner. They shot Gordon, right in front of me… _Jim Gordon,_ Niks. He didn't deserve that…" Will says, his voice trailing off, and another memory hits me. Of hanging around in a homeless shelter for days after the madness-gas descended, not knowing where we were or where everybody else. And then Jim Gordon came in to talk to all the kids. He'd knelt down in front of us, looked us all in the eye, one by one, and had said he was working to help us get out of here, to put us in homes and in orphanages where we'd be safe, where we wouldn't have to fight each other for a bed, or take turns sleeping on the floor so one person could have a good night's sleep. He was the one who put Will into St Swithin's. Without him, Will would've been a wandering homeless kid, like so many others in this city. Will owed Jim Gordon a great deal; the Commissioner was one of the only people Will ever respected.

I feel my anger waning and I sit next to him. "Now do you see?" I say softly.

He hesitates. "I… I don't know."

I stare at him incredulously. "Will, you can't seriously be thinking of staying after that."

"I've got no choice," he whispers. "You said yourself that you've seen Bane… he isn't afraid of anything, and he's capable of snapping my neck like a twig…" Something changes in Will's expression then, and he stares at me, jaw hanging open. "How the hell did you get down here?!"

"You mean, you've only just figured out I'm here, just then?"

"Shut up and answer my question."

"Josh is here," I whisper, and his face hardens. He looks like he's about to be sick. "I followed him here, through that little shack in the New Narrows."

"And they just let you in here?"

"Apparently your boss isn't too picky about who he recruits."

"You can say that again," Will mutters darkly. And then he grins unexpectedly. "This is one of the few times when you're the cream of the crop."

I scowl at him and he chuckles softly.

A laugh which quickly dies in his throat. "You shouldn't be here. It's too dangerous, you shouldn't have come."

I sniff and stand up. "Well," I say, folding my arms across my chest and giving Will an impish grin. "I couldn't very well leave the damsel in distress, now could I?"

"In this instant, me being the damsel?"

"As per usual, yeah."

"And you're my knight?"

"Correct."

"You did a hell of a job slaying the dragon, Ser."

"Have you seen the size of the aforementioned dragon? My idea was to get you out, not waltzing in pretending to be a hero and that shit."

"Pretending being the operative word."

"You ass."

Will laughs again. "You really did all this for me?" he asks, looking up at me hopefully. I sniff again, brushing off his affection. Me and Will don't have an affectionate type of relationship in the typical sense. We do much better with vicious insults to convey our affection. "Don't flatter yourself. I was kinda bored too. Had to make my own entertainment after you left."

He smirks. "Sure, of course." He keeps a smile on his face, but it doesn't seem genuine.

I know the reason for his worry and I sigh. "You can't stay here. You're not a killer, Will; you don't belong with these people. You're _good_."

"Where do we go?" he whispers. "We can't stay in Gotham."

"We can move to another distri-"

"No!" Will snaps and then looks behind me to make sure he wasn't too loud. "Nowhere in Gotham is going to be safe, nowhere. Not with what they're planning."

I stare at him, horrified. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Will looks around nervously. "They're planning something big. They won't tell us all of it, but it'll change everything around here, in Gotham. They're planning something at the stock exchange tonight, I heard them talking; they've got… they've got guns ready for it."

_They're going to kill innocent people_.

"Have they asked you to go along?" My voice sounds hollow.

Will shakes his head. "Only the upper level guys are going. Bane and his guys."

A small voice in the back of my head starts screaming at me. _You're just going to leave Gotham to these people?! You're just going to run away and hide while everyone burns_?

I feel cold inside, right to my core. _I'm not Batman. I can't save everybody. The most I can do is save one person. Save Will_.

He doesn't speak for a few minutes, and I allow him time to think. _Make the right choice, Will. Make the right decision_.

Finally, he looks up, and there's a spark of determination in his eyes that wasn't there before, and it gives me hope. "We gotta get out of here," he says firmly, and I'm so happy I nearly squeal. I settle instead for a blinding smile. "Well, it's about goddamn time, you jackass."

He grins brightly and leaps up from the bed, snatching up his hoody and shoving it on over his plain white t-shirt. "There are a few tunnels out of here that nobody really patrols, we should be able to use those," he says quickly, shrugging on his hoody and zipping it up. He looks almost frenzied with determination. "And if anybody gives me trouble, they take people out on recruitment missions all the time. I'll just say we're going on one of those."

"And they'll believe you?"

"They've got no reason not to," he shrugs. "Come on, we gotta go now."

He steps out of the cell and looks to his right, to where the stairs are.

I look the same way and my heart nearly stops.

"Will," I whimper.

Bane is standing right at the mouth of the corridor. There is nothing between us and him, nobody standing in the way, but he doesn't move. He stands perfectly still, his hands loose at his sides, his head cocked as he observes us.

Observes _me_. He's not looking at Will at all, not even a cursory glance. I meet his gaze, that fierce blue fire, and it's enough to make me feel sick. The compulsion to run is there again, but I fight it, for now. If Bane comes at us, I won't hesitate to flee like a bat out of hell.

And then, Bane speaks.

"Leaving so soon?"

His voice is strange, metallic and muffled from the mask, but the accent beneath it is rich and cultured, a man of knowledge. He doesn't have to raise his voice to let it carry down the corridor to us. His eyes are still crackling with sadistic amusement, like a cat observing a mouse in a trap desperately try to claw its way free.

Will beside me has stopped breathing. "Recruit-recruitment drive," Will stutters, his voice as dry as the desert. I offer no comment, still locked in place by Bane's gaze. _We're going to die_, I think with no emotion whatsoever. _We're going to die and we're going to die slowly_.

"Oh, I don't think you are," Bane says, taking a step forward, planting his foot with careful precision. The grating trembles beneath my feet. "You swore loyalty to us, to our cause, _brother_," he stops walking and studies us again. "You signed a deal with the devil; you made hell your home. You don't just get to walk back into the light."

"Nikki, run," Will says urgently under his breath. I look up at him, eyes wide and glassy. "Go, _now_."

"I'm not leaving without you," I tell him back, turning back to look at Bane. He's getting closer.

"What makes you think that either of you would be allowed to leave?" Bane asks, sounding almost genuinely curious. He takes another step.

"Please," Will says, his voice breaking. "She doesn't know anything, she doesn't know anything."

"Oh, but she does," Bane says, chastising, looking back at me again. "You dragged her down into the dark, brother. She can't climb back to the surface now."

"We'd leave!" Will begs desperately. "We'll just leave the city, we won't tell anybody anything, and we'll just go."

Bane drags his gaze from mine to look at Will, and Will visibly flinches. Bane looks back at me again, eyes narrowed, curious. I can hear him breathing through the mask on his face, a mechanical sound like he's using it as an oxygen mask. I'm torn inside. _Can I do that? Can I leave this city to die, just to save me and Will_?

I know, in that instant, that, were we ever allowed to just _leave_, there's no way I could leave without telling somebody. I picture all the people I walk past in the street every day, all the girls in the office, Mr and Mrs Jacobs, Commissioner Gordon, even Bruce Wayne huddled up alone in his attic, and I know I can't leave them to this man. This maniac. I can't.

And Bane sees this too.

"Really?" he says disbelievingly, examining my face. "I sincerely doubt that."

I take a look at Will's face and he looks utterly distraught, lost. He believes we're going to die.

A fire flames inside me and I grit my teeth. _Fuck that. I'm not dying down here_.

I glance behind us, to where the waterfall is tumbling down. I don't want to think of how high up it is, but I can see several sturdy, thick silver chains hanging from the ceiling, disappearing well past the floor beneath us. If we can get to those…

I turn back to Bane, and his eyes are lit up. He sees what I'm going to do. He wants to see if I have the balls. Knowing I'll probably die.

"You might have fooled all these people, but you're not fooling me," I hear myself say. Will stares down at me in amazement, and Bane tilts his head a little further, curiously. "I know what you are, what you're trying to do. You're not some saviour of the repressed and the poor, you're the devil. And I'm not about to let you claim my friend's soul, or Gotham's," I say determinedly.

Bane's eyes sparkle with amusement. "Then I shall start with yours," he says and starts forward, moving faster.

And then I bellow. "_**Will, run!**_"

I take off in a sprint, heading for the waterfall. I can hear the bewildered shouts of the workers around me, and I can feel the pounding footsteps of people on the move. I don't know if Will's right behind me and I don't stop to check.

I reach the edge of the railing, and I leap for the chains.

_CLIFFHANGER. I did this deliberately, see. Keeps you all interested. _

_I also haven't exactly decided what's going to happen next, so at least it's a cliffhanger for me too. :D_


	8. Chapter 8

_Hey all! Hope the last two weeks have been lovely for you all. And, if they haven't, if it's any consolation, the last two weeks for me have been great. I'm back now, so there's some comfort to you. ;D Anyhoo, I had a little bit of trouble writing this one. When I left this two weeks ago, I didn't know exactly where I was going to go with it, I wasn't sure how it was going to go - Nikki gets away, or Bane gets Nikki? It took me a long while to decide (and it also provided a nice break from playing _Slender. _I honest-to-God have no idea why I downloaded that game. Nightmares, all the nightmares. That'll teach me to stray from Skyrim) and I hope you'll be pleased with the result. _

_As always, leave reviews or message me and whatnot. I like hearing that people are eager for updates, it feeds the ego nicely. :'D_

_Enjoy! :) :)_

Everything slows. I can suddenly hear everything swirling around me in one deafening roar: a symphony of aggressive wordless shouts and the pop of bullets being released from their black metal chambers and the ferocious unending snarling of waves of white water crashing violently to the ground. My world narrows, fading away until the only thing left is the thick coils of silver hanging in front of me, sturdy metal curls as thick as my waist. I am filled with a determination so strong I can taste it in my mouth, feel it thumping through my veins, thick and hot and fiery, and for one second, I am not falling through the air, tumbling helplessly to the ground, I am _flying_, soaring up and out of this terrible place of desperation and danger.

_So close, so close, so close_…

My outstretched hands brush lightly against the edge of the chains, stroking it with the very tips of my fingers, the chains dancing in the air with a light musical tinkling as they twirl around each other. It's odd just how clear this sound is, the metallic singing of the chains like a wind chime, when it should by all rights be inaudible against the thunderous rolling of the waterfall.

I have just enough time to think how strange that is, the clarity of the soft metallic chiming, and how strange it is that, in the midst of leaping to what very well could be my death, this thought still manages to flicker through my head.

And then I can no longer feel the icy cold metal against the edge of my fingers. My hands grasp hungrily at the empty air, stretching towards the chains that only seem to be getting further and further away from me, slipping out of my grasp, a gap widening between us every slowly ticking second.

My stomach suddenly dissolves, leaving me feeling sickeningly hollow, adrenaline shoots through my body like a violent shiver, and my ears fill with a tremendous whooshing sound, like a jumbo jet is flying directly above my head. Clarity hits me like a blow to the face and I realise I am not flying, not even a little bit: I am falling and I am falling out of reach of the only thing that can save me from being splattered against the bottom layer of grating like a water balloon.

Time speeds up again, flying past in a nauseating blur, spinning so quickly around me that it seems like time is picking up the pace even more so than usual, to make up for the few blissful seconds of stillness I experienced a moment ago. I force myself forward, straining my arms out as far as my joints will allow me, willing my fingers forward with such intensity that my hand starts burning with a numbing, protesting pain. I don't dare look up, look around me, try and make it harder for the bullets to hit me. If I do, if I lapse my concentration for even a second, I am dead. And I don't want to die. Looking into Bane's eyes before and seeing the promise of a slow and excruciatingly painful death glistening in the icy blue fire there made me even more certain than ever. I will not die. I will not let him get me. I will not become one of his playthings, to amuse him while Gotham burns around. I _will not_.

I strain again, lurching my whole body forwards in the air towards the chains. The wind whips at my face angrily, tearing mercilessly at my eyes, provoking tears. I keep my eyes defiantly open; the teary film obscuring my vision now almost blocks out the chains completely, but I feel them beneath my fingers, feel the cold hard metal almost feel like fabric underneath my skimming fingers. I seize them blindly, gripping the chains with both hands in an iron grip. There's a blinding, wrenching pain in my shoulder blades, and the world stops flying around me, settling into order so suddenly that it makes me feel dizzier than when I was falling. I glance down underneath me, sliding down the chains at a much slower pace now. A small part of my mind notes that I'm hanging just above the second floor, slipping quickly downwards towards the gushing pools of white water flooding through into the underground sewer systems. The larger part of my mind, however, is preoccupied with the realisation that the chain to which I'm so lovingly attached stops just below the second level. Meaning that I'm going to have to let go. And drop about twenty feet into the water.

Well, _shit_.

I allow myself a quick glance upwards, wrapping both of my arms around the chains and hugging them for dear life, slowing my progress a little. The metal burns against my hands and my bare flesh, but I grit my teeth and cling on, keeping my face firmly away from the now-warm metal and tilting my chin upwards. Dozens of men line the levels above me, snarling down at me, their faces all red and screaming. I feel eerily like an animal in a zoo, staring up at all the looming spectators helplessly. All their faces blur into one, one nondescript face copied into a hundred different canvases, a hundred faces carved with the same expression of anger and rage and hatred. All except one. Bane's face stands out in stark contrast to the others, like a flickering candle in the darkness, and not just because of the heavy mask screwed onto his skull; he stands on the upper level leaning heavily on the copper railing, his massive hands clenching the rusting metal so tightly that I wouldn't be surprised if, when he moved away, he left indentations. He stands almost perfectly still, his thick muscular shoulders moving slowly as he breathes, the only person in this entire cavernous hole that seems to be perfectly calm, perfectly relaxed. I don't know if I'm imagining it or not, but, when I look up at his face, I can somehow still see his eyes, observing me with that same expression of bemused curiosity, like I was a pet who'd done something particularly amusing rather than a human being.

One of the men next to him raises his gun with one hand, leaning so heavily over the railing that he looks like he's about to leap off himself and fly down to tackle me personally. In a movement so fast that I almost don't see it, Bane slams a closed fist down on the man's wrist, sending the little black gun tumbling down towards me. It flies much faster than I do, spiralling downwards into the water beneath me, disappearing into the ravenous waves below without a trace of ever having existed. The man who had owned the gun has his mouth open in a shout of pain, eyes widened and disbelieving as he stares down at his wrist, now limp and twisted at a sickeningly distorted proportion. Before he can look to his master, Bane jabs his elbow into the man's throat and, when the man doubles up, his head disappearing below the railing, Bane grabs the back of his collar with one hand and yanks backwards, sending the man slamming into the wall behind him, gone from sight.

I stare, stunned, at Bane, frozen by the viciousness and the suddenness of his attack on his worker. A worker who'd been trying to stop me from trying to escape, which is surely what Bane wants. Why stop him? Why not let him kill me, why_ save_ me?

Bane turns back to me, cool and collected again, like he hasn't just beaten the shit out of somebody. His eyes meet mine again and I know why he hasn't killed me, why he hasn't let one of his men kill me. It's too easy. Too easy a death. Not nearly enough pain involved.

I'm still staring at him, loosening my grip to slide slowly down the remaining sliver of chains beneath me when another of his men appears at his side, glaring down at me with a powerful, frightening hostility before handing something to his boss. It's a chunky black brick, just a little bit longer than the length of my hand, and there are three bright buttons stamped onto the surface, all a bright, brazen yellow. Bane takes it from his worker without even bothering to look at him, keeping his eyes on mine the entire time.

I stare at the brick, uncomprehending.

Bane pushes his thumb down on the top button, and the chain I'm holding onto starts to shake, trembling so hard it's like the chains are trying to shake me loose. I grasp tighter, shooting the air underneath me a terrified look. I'm at the very end of the chain now, my lower half dangling freely in the air, but the drop somehow looks even higher than it did when I was a few feet up.

And then I realise that this reason for this is because the chain is moving. The chain is being pulled back upwards, retracting.

Delivering me right to Bane.

The chain is slowly shuddering upwards, making an ear-splitting scraping sound, like metal being put through a blender. A detached part of my brain notes that this must be how they transport heavier supplies up to the top floor, and vice versa, instead of lugging them up the endless flights of grated states. I stay frozen, unable to move, unable to think, letting myself be dragged back upwards, back to Bane. _And when I reach him_…

I can't let that happen.

I slide to the very bottom of the chain, the very end, until I'm holding on with just my hands. My arms are stretched as far as they can go above my head and my shoulders are screaming in pain, blazing with agony at the strain being put on them now. I have a feeling I might have dislocated one or possibly both of them, but I hold on tightly, gritting my teeth against the pain, to the point when I feel I'm almost grinding my teeth down. I glance down again. If I don't jump now, soon it will be too late. Soon, the jump will be impossible and I'll have no choice but to either relinquish myself up to Bane, and all the horror that would involve, or killing myself. And, as enticing as those offers are, I still choose Plan A: survive.

I look up one last time, at Bane's face.

Only, it's not his face that catches my eye. It's the face in front of his.

It's Will's face.

_No. No. __**NO**_.

Bane's eyes behind him are smiling.

Unthinkingly, without my brain's permission, my right hand lets go of the chain, stretched out to grab Will, to pull him away from Bane and towards me, to escape.

My left hand falters, unable to support my weight.

Realisation hits me then and I make a grab for the chain again, desperately snatching at it with a clawed hand.

My nails catch the bottom of the chain, sending it dancing again.

I fall backwards and everything slows again. All I can see is Will's face, blurred but most definitely his, and, even now, my hands crane up to try to reach Will. Two other men have both of their hands wrapped firmly around Will's upper arms, holding him firmly in place, and he looks to be sagging in their grasp a little, like they've winded him. I can't see his expression from down here. I open my mouth to call to him, to curse Bane, to scream out one final death screech if needs be. A tingling sensation is dancing up and down both of my arms, numbing me from shoulder to fingertip, and the burning sensation in my shoulders has only grown fiercer.

And then I hit the water, and the words on my lips, whatever they may have been, are drowned, forced back by the sudden stream of water flooding my nose and mouth. Panicked, I inhale a gasp, causing more water to force itself eagerly down my throat. I thrash wildly in the water, blinking rapidly against the sting of the water against my open eyes, trying to figure out which direction the surface is in. It would be impossible to tell up from down were it not for the fading light of Bane's hideout, growing dimmer and dimmer in the distant off to my right. I kick my legs harder, battling against the fast flowing current, forcing my screaming shoulder muscles to move my arms, pulling desperately on the water around me, trying to haul myself upwards. My throat feels as ragged and as painful as if I'd been swallowing flames whole, which would also explain the agony in my lungs, or, rather, the two balls of fire where my lungs used to be.

Just when I start to think that I've been kicking in the wrong direction, going further into the murky depths rather than upwards, my head breaks the water and I can breathe again, emerging to the surface with a guttural, zombie-like gasp, sucking in air greedily. My chest relaxes and I am suddenly, powerfully on the urge of breaking into hysterical sobs. My whole body starts shaking violently and I briefly wonder if I'm going into shock.

_You can go into shock later. We have to get out first_.

I nod to nobody in particular and I start swimming forwards, narrowing my eyes, squinting off into the darkness. There's no light to give me a clue as to what the tunnel looks like, save for the faint reflection of the water against the steely grey tunnel innards; without warning, the tunnel bends left, sharply, and I slam into the corner hard. My chest takes most of the impact, but my right shoulder smacks against the wall and an explosion of pain blooms in my arm, so strong that I almost pass out, my vision flickering like static in front of me. I twist my body, trying to keep my shoulder out of harm's way, but another turn appears, this time channelling the water left.

My left shoulder takes the brunt of the blow this time and pain like I've never felt before engulfs me.

The last thing I'm aware of before I black out entirely is the water bubbling against my lips as I sink.


	9. Chapter 9

In the darkness, the blue fire is the only thing I can see. It casts shadows around me, splaying the shapes of monstrous men at my feet, twitching and writhing like they're trying to reach out to me. I stumble away from them, lurching blindly in the darkness to get away, but the blue fire follows me, turning its burning gaze to watch me fumble around blindly, sending more shadow men crawling on the floor towards me. I look around me, clawing at the darkness, trying desperately to find a way out, to find a way to escape from the unrelenting blue flames, but there's nowhere I can hide, no patch of darkness that I could crawl into, no nothing. The light creeps ever closer, burning with an even more ferocious intensity with every inch closer it gets to me, lighting my skin with a heat so hot that my skin prickles, like every exposed skin cell has suddenly caught fire. I try to run, but, as I turn my back on the flames, hands grab my shoulders, digging in so hard that I cry out, pain slicing through my back like a knife. The hands yank me backwards, sending me crashing to the floor. Another shockwave of pain rolls me through my shoulder blades and tears spring to my eyes. I try to pick myself back up, trying to force myself to move, to _get away_, but the pain is too great. I can't sum up the energy needed to fight the pain away, it's too much; I can't even throw my arms over my eyes to block out the fire, so I squeeze my eyelids shut, seeing the blue through my closed lids even now.

And then it suddenly disappears, the world behind my eyelids going almost completely black. Only a faint neon blue ripple remains, and I open my eyes curiously, despite myself.

A man stands over me, a monster, made almost entirely of rock hard muscle. His face is mostly obscured by moving black liquid, crawling down the centre of his forehead like spilled ink, but I can just about make out his eyes. They're not as painful to look at as the blue fire, but I still can barely make myself meet his gaze. He cocks his head to the side, the darkness on his face rippling as he moves. He starts to kneel down, stooping from an almost impossible high level to reach me. So close now, he looks almost sad, his forehead and eyes wrinkled with despair. I wait for him silently, letting out shaky, ragged breaths through the pain.

He lifts up an arm and I can't even bring myself to flinch, I'm frozen solid. He stretches out his hand, leaning forward until his index finger is literally an inch away from the spot on my chest concealing my heart. He looks mournfully up from my chest to meet my eyes again. "I will take your soul," he says, his strange metallic voice echoing around me. He is quiet, hushed. "And then, I will take Gotham's."

He leans forward then, touching the tip of his index finger to my chest.

White hot agony explodes from the space where he touched me and a blinding white light floods my eyeballs, burning my retinas, and I scream and scream and scream, so loudly and for so long that my throat hurts.

"Nurse! Get a nurse, goddamn it, she's freaking out!"

The voice is not Bane's voice, not the same quiet menace I could hear so clearly a moment ago.

_He is not Bane_.

I stop screaming, letting my voice trail off into a quiet whimper. My whole body is trembling, with fear or with pain or both, and there's an ache in my shoulders so fierce I almost pass out again, but I force myself to stay awake, stay alert. I'm lying down, propped up on something lumpy and uncomfortable, with a thin wispy sheet covering my lower half, and my back hums with a stiff ache. There's a harsh, stinging clinical smell in my nose, constantly making me want to sneeze, and the sound of shoes clacking noisily against squeaky linoleum is so overbearingly loud that it beats against me with every step. _I'm in a hospital_, I realise, and I slowly crank my eyes open, squinting cautiously around me. The room I'm in is small, with most of the space occupied by the bed I'm lying in; the only other furnishings in the room are a small porcelain sink, its previously spotless white marred with scratches and chips, a mirror, spattered with faded fingerprint marks, and a small plastic chair on my left hand side. There's a person currently occupying the chair – a young man, about five or so years older than me, with slick inky black hair cropped closely to his head and small dark eyes, staring worriedly at my face. He's dressed in a dark navy blue sweater and black trousers, a chequered black-and-blue shirt poking out from underneath his sweater, and there's a chunky black coat draped carefully over the back of his chair. His eyes flicker over my features, touching on my forehead, my cheeks, my temples before he realises I'm awake, and that I'm looking at him. His eyes widen in surprise and he relaxes his features, giving me a weak smile. The smile transforms his whole face, giving him a boyish look about him, and I'm suddenly, acutely aware of how handsome he is. It really shouldn't occur to me, since I nearly just died and all, but I still feel heat rise to my cheeks and butterflies fluttering their wings in my stomach. Goddammit.

"You scared the hell out of me just then," he says, chuckling lightly again.

"Sorry," I rasp, wincing as I speak. My voice is as hoarse as a chain smoker's, and it burns horrifically. My visitor notices my pain and reaches downwards, grabbing a bottle off water at his feet and passing it carefully to me. "Here," he says softly, pressing the bottle into my hands. His hands, when they touch mine, are soft and warm. I thank him without meeting his eyes and raise the bottle to my lips. The movement makes my shoulder twinge with pain, but it's a bearable pain, forgotten as soon as the tepid water trickles down my throat, a much more pleasant sensation than the sewer water forcing itself into my lungs. That thought chokes me and I put down the water bottle, giving my visitor a quick smile of thanks.

"Gotta be a lot better than sewer water, right?" he says, the smile slipping from his face. I stare at him, surprised at how eerily he has echoed the words I was just thinking. "You're very lucky not to have more serious injuries than you do…" he gestures at my shoulder. "One of your shoulders was dislocated and the other very nearly dislocated. You must have had a good reason for going for a swim down there if that's you ended up," he says quietly, meeting my eyes unblinkingly. Images flash in front of my eyes then, images from down there… the unending, writhing grey tunnels… the gaunt, hollow-eyed people huddled together… the bed with the tubes attached to it… Bane… _Will_…

_Oh, Will_.

"Who are you?" I ask softly. My voice doesn't sound like my own.

"My name's Officer Blake, I'm with the Gotham City police department," he says his name quietly, like he's trying not to scare me; he pulls his badge out without me having to ask, letting me examine his credentials long enough for me to feel satisfied he's genuine. I allow myself a smile. "Unusual parents, to call you Officer," I joke, taking another sip of water. Blake grins a wide grin, showing off lovely white teeth. "I think they might have been just really optimistic," he jokes back.

"At least they chose you a good career-name. It could have been worse," I offer him a smile, playing with the label of the water bottle. He nods. "At least my job isn't boring?"

The smile fades from my face as I think about why his job isn't boring. Blake has a similarly morose expression on his handsome face. I clear my throat and look down at the bottle again. "You're here about the people in the tunnels, aren't you?"

Blake's jaw tightens. "What did you see down there?"

I keep looking down at the bottle. The sound of my fingers tearing the label off of the bottle is made even louder by the tense silence between us now. "There are dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. People that are convinced they've got no other choice but to join him, and do what he wants. _Bane_," I say the name with a shiver, eyes of blue fire filling my mind. I remember my dream, or my hallucination, whatever it was:_ I will take your soul… and then, I will take Gotham's_… Fear grips my heart and I look up at Blake urgently. "They're planning something, tonight, at the… at the stock exchange," I struggle to remember exactly, thinking back to Will's words in his cold, lonely cell in Bane's hole. _Will… _tears spring to my eyes then, and I bite down on my lip, inhaling a gasp. _How could I leave you_?

Blake leans forward, a hand resting gently on my forearm. "What's wrong?" he asks, studying my face anxiously. He starts to turn towards the doorway, opening his mouth to shout for someone. A nurse, I bet, thinking I'm in pain. _Physical _pain, at least. I put a hand to my mouth, trying to cover the tears. _Will, Will, Will, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, Will_… "I left him," I burst out, trying to control the hysterics. I think of Will, of _Bane_… _Oh god, what have I left him to_? "I thought he was right behind me, and I just jumped, and I fell, and I didn't stop to look for him, and I should have, and he's still down there, with Bane, and… and…" I can't speak for a moment, overcome with guilt and grief. _What if he's dead_? _What if Bane's torturing him_? _I've left him to die; I left him behind, thinking only of myself_…

Blake doesn't know how to react to the sudden weeping fit; he pats my arm sympathetically and waits silently for me to compose myself. He can't offer me any comfort – he saw what Bane and his men did to Commissioner Gordon – and the only reason he would offer me any comfort is because he needs to know what Bane is planning tonight. For the first time in my life, I feel an overwhelming disgust with the police, for carrying more about Bane than about people like Will, _good _people. This thought is enough to stop the hysterics and I wrench my arm away from Blake, folding my arms across my chest. I sniff heavily and stare defiantly at Blake. "That's what I heard. One of the guys down in the tunnels said they were going to try something on the stock exchange tonight. He didn't say when exactly, just that it was going to be tonight," I inform him stiffly. He looks at me with a slight frown, trying to figure out what exactly has happened to make my mood shift so dramatically. "Do you know why they're targeting the stock exchange?"

"They didn't go into that much detail, I'm afraid," I reply, and I sound much sharper than I intended to be. "I'm sorry," I say instantly, running my hand through my hair. "I just…"

"There's somebody you know down there, isn't there?" he asks, watching my face carefully. _Will_. I nod, my throat thick with fresh tears. "That stubborn jackass is why I went down there in the first place," I laugh. It sounds more than a little hysterical.

Blake stares at me in astonishment. "You went down there all by yourself to get your friend back?" he shakes his head disbelievingly. "I think you're just about braver than the entire police department, miss," he grins, trying to win me back onto his side.

"You should try telling them that; they never believe me when I say it," I murmur, passing him back the bottle of water with a quiet thanks. "What are you going to do about Bane?" I ask calmly. Blake doesn't respond for a few moments; he stares broodingly down at the water bottle, staring vacantly at it. When he looks back up at me, his eyes are troubled. "We're going to stop him."

_You can't_.

"How?" I ask, almost inaudibly. I see Blake standing up to Bane, standing toe-to-toe with him, and it's not a pleasant image.

"He's no different from any of the other criminals Gotham has had before. We can stop him just like we did the others."

"But it wasn't you who stopped them before," I say before I can stop myself. Blake's eyes darken, but he doesn't look angry. He looks like he's been thinking the exact same thing. "And Bane isn't… he's different. He's different," I add on, though I'm not quite sure why. He isn't so different from the other psychopaths who have attempted to destroy Gotham and the lives of its citizens before. I think of the Joker and, with a surge of hatred, Jonathan Crane: they both wanted to cause pain, to deliberately torment and torture people, and it's clear enough, to me at least, that Bane thrives on the suffering of others. He just dresses it up in the guise of a _cause_, pretending to be some sort of twisted Robin Hood character. He's no different, really. He _shouldn't _be any different, but I can't quite put him in the same class as the other two. I can't compare him to Jonathan Crane – the rage and anger I feel when I think of Bane is nothing compared to the all consuming loathing I feel when Crane's name pops into my head. Nowhere near the same.

"You never know," Blake mutters to himself, drawing me out of my thoughts. He wrings his hand, looking uneasy. "Maybe it's time for the Batman to come back."

This surprises me. I give him a curious look. "That doesn't sound like what you police types usually say."

Blake laughs mirthlessly. "No, I guess it's not."

"But you're different?"

"I suppose so. I don't see the Batman the same as the rest of them do."

I frown even deeper. "You don't think he's a bad guy, even though he killed Harvey Dent?"

"I think… I think nobody knows what happened to Harvey Dent except Harvey Dent and the Batman."

"And Commissioner Gordon."

Blake nods, unconvinced. "Yeah… and Commissioner Gordon…" he shakes himself a little then, and plasters a fake smile on his face. "Thanks for your time, miss," he says, starting to rise from his seat.

I sit up too. "Where are you going?"

He stops, with a frown. "To see the Commissioner. He has to hear what you just told me."

"Then why don't I tell him myself?" I say, kicking the sheet off of my legs and swinging my legs to the side. Blake crouches back down and puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. His face is barely a few inches from mine. _Must not swoon now, for God's sake_. "I think you need some rest," he says soothingly, trying to make me lie down again.

"Fuck rest." Blake looks a little shocked at my use of curse words. "I want to help you. I _need _to help you."

Blake sighs. I expect he's heard this before. "Look, I get that you're worried about your friend-"

"_You, look_," I snap, pushing him away from me and standing myself up. The world spins a little and I have to lean on my bed, but I manage not to fall over. "You know perfectly well that I am not just going to sit here and wait for you to _stop Bane _when I could be doing something about it. The faster you get Bane, the faster I get my friends back. The faster I get my life back. And I don't care if you're a police officer and that you can't have civilians messing around with police business, _I don't care_. And I don't need to hang around with you, I don't need you to protect me. I just need you to let me walk out of here so I can do something more useful to help than _rest_."

Blake stares at me for a few moments, utterly bewildered. I'm a good six or so inches shorter than he is, but I puff my chest up as much as possible, straightening my back and staring him right in the eyes with a look Will has affectionately nicknamed 'Crazy Eyes'. It manages to scare Will, whose only major fear in life is moths – it should do the job against Officer Blake.

After a while, Blake's shoulders sag. He even looks a little amused. He picks up his jacket from the back of his chair and shrugs it on. Underneath it is the hoody I'd taken from the apartment, the big grey one. He gives it a confused look, but passes it politely to me all the same. "You stick with me at all times, and under no circumstances do you go running off down to the tunnels, we clear?" he asks sternly as I pull the hoody on. I nod gravely. He looks at me for a few seconds and then shakes his head again. "Remind me to recommend you for a placement at the department," he chuckles, walking out of the door and down the corridor. He glances over his shoulder at me as I obediently tale him. "Better check with a nurse first. Make sure you're fit for active duty," he grins and disappears around the corner.


	10. Chapter 10

_Hi everybody! I'm sorry I haven't updated this in **so long. **I'm back at university now and second year is unfortunately a lot more time-consuming than first year. But, I'm nearing the Christmas break and I'm very excited about it - I absolutely adore Christmas, I get to see my family and friends from back home, and, obviously, The Dark Knight Rises is out on DVD now, so I can enjoy it whenever. Tom Hardy can reclaim his 'obsession of the moment' trophy from Joel McHale and Daniel Tosh. :D_

_Hope everybody is doing wonderfully! Thank you for reading. :)_

The corridors of the hospital are long and winding, like an intricate concrete maze, filled with constantly moving doctors and nurses racing past us in muted shades of blue, green and red. They move effortlessly through us, like dancers twisting their bodies around us just before they're about to collide with us. Several times, Blake throws an arm around my shoulders to protect me from the rush, his hand hovering a few inches away from my arm. Walking with him makes me feel like a child again and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it – it's nice feeling protected, safe, especially since he's a cop and everything, but I've gone so long now having to protect myself that the gesture feels patronizing condescending. Every time he does it, I feel my face flush, like a parent has done something particularly mortifying in public, and I edge a little further away from him. The glinting silver shield strapped to his chest keeps catching my eye, winking cheekily at me in the clinical white light, and I just keep thinking of Jim Gordon's badge, the one he'd given us to examine that night that my mother died: he let the littler kids see it first, watching them sadly as they examined it with a reverent gaze, and then he showed it to us, to let us know who he was. The police department's updated the design a little since then, but I swear it's almost exactly the same one. I wonder if Gordon has his badge on him now. The thought of him losing his badge down in Bane's lair makes me feel so suddenly and unexpectedly devastated that I find it hard to breathe for a moment. A symbol of something so hopeful should not belong down there. Not in that darkness.

Occasionally, Blake glances down at me curiously, like he wants to ask me a question but can't quite summon up the courage. I don't bother asking him what's on his mind. Cops never sit quietly on their thoughts for long.

I know which room Jim Gordon is in before we even enter the room; as we turn yet another corner, two guards turn their heads to greet us, both wearing body armour as thick as two coats, sleek and black like hardened oil, and they're both carrying weapons as long as my arm, big black things that, for some reason or another, remind me of small sharks, slick and lethal. Blake shifts his body slightly so that the shoulder bearing his shield is more prominent, an announcement of his status. The guards let their eyes slide down quick enough to be assured he's legitimate, and then they nod, stepping aside in eerie unison, like robots. They make me feel uncomfortable, ridiculously so; as Blake steps forward to open the door, pushing it gently open and waiting for me to pass through, I hunch my shoulders and make myself as slim as possible, to avoid contact with either of the guards. I slide past Blake with my eyes fixed firmly to the floor, avoiding his curious frown as I pass.

"Hold it!" A voice snaps angrily. I glance up to meet watery blue-grey eyes the colour of a cloudy sky narrowed into hostile slits, glowering accusingly down at me from at least a foot above my five-four. His long, khaki brown trench coat makes his slim build look a little broader, and his perfectly neat shirt-and-tie combination sets him out as somebody of importance, not just an average detective. Every other cop I've seen, even the higher up detectives, has a tie slightly out of a place, a button ignored, a hair slightly out of place – even Blake, handsome as he looks, has a slight wrinkle to his shirt, a certain wildness to his sleek black hair. Not this guy. He looks like he ironed all of his clothes while he was still wearing them. He jabs a slightly chubby finger in my direction and glares over my head at Blake. "Who the hell is this? No civilians allowed in here, officer," he snaps, sneering the word 'officer' with smug superiority. _This _is the type of cop I don't like. The type who got too self-important after a couple of promotions. The reason why I liked Jim Gordon so much, aside from his help on the night of my mother's death, was because he never acted like he was too good to talk to anybody. He was a genuinely good guy. I bet half the guys in my neighbourhood would have had a bit more respect for cops if they were all more like Gordon, and if they didn't walk around the New Narrows with barely suppressed grimaces of disgust, like this man undoubtedly would.

"Deputy Commissioner, this is the girl we found by one of the sewer holes. She saw what was going on down there, she heard some stuff you've gotta hear."

The Deputy, Commissioner's eyes twitch then, and I can just tell he's trying to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Bubbles of rage quiver inside my stomach, but I clench my jaw and try to stop myself. It's harder than I thought: the man drags his eyes over to mine, the flinch of disgust barely concealed as he meets my eyes. "Enlighten me, then, to this _masked man _and all _army_."

I clench my teeth, swallowing hard on the sarcastic reply lying on my tongue, and I turn to look at Jim Gordon to give my response.

It's a hard sight to take in. He looks _broken_. Old. He's awake, his head propped up on two hard-looking white pillows, an oxygen mask fastened loosely around his head, one of his hands cupping it around his mouth. His skin is pale, an unsettling grey-ish hue, and his hair looks limp, lank, like there's no life left in it. Only his eyes are alive, alert, looking at me with a vigilance and attention that I wouldn't have expected from the rumours about his condition. _He got all washed up outside one of the sewer grates, nearly dead_. I can just hear the voices of the girls from my office, whispering excitedly in the corner. They wouldn't seem so eager to say such a thing if they could see Gordon now.

Gordon notices my attention and a spark of recognition begins to bloom in his eyes. Impossible. After the hundreds of cases he must go through every goddamn _day_ in this messed-up wreck of a city, he couldn't remember me. Another lost face in a sea of others, especially on the day I first met him, awash amongst an ocean of madness. With so many others with stories so similar to mine, we were all just one person to him then.

I feel a hand at my elbow then, warm and reassuring and touching me with only the lightest of pressure. I don't need to look round to know it's Blake. For one second, it's almost like having Will back: vivid memory fills me then, of the first time Jim got sent to prison; me and Will standing outside the courtroom doors, watching our friend slink off in a horrifically bright orange jumpsuit, his head slumped against his chest lifelessly. The only thing that kept me from crying was Will, the knowledge that he was behind me and that he was here, and I wasn't alone. I'm grateful now to Blake for doing that for me too.

I clear my throat and start speaking, mostly to Gordon rather than to the man before me; he watches me speak like I'm a child telling a story, his arms folded across his chest, his head lowered and cocked to the side condescendingly. His posture screams of dismissal and I can feel my tone getting angrier and angrier as I speak.

When I finally finish, Gordon looks even more alive, his eyes wider and brighter, shining with excitement. The Deputy Commissioner, however, does not. "And why didn't you come to the police with this?"

I snort derisively. "Like you would have cared what would happen to some kids none of Gotham cares about," I say quietly, looking unflinchingly into the Deputy Commissioner's eyes. I doubt, even now I've told him everything, he actually cares about those people down there. They're just faceless henchmen to him, not people driven by desperation. "When was the last time any police officer even set foot in the New Narrows?"

The Deputy Commissioner narrows his eyes at me. "Cooperation from the locals has made that more difficult than it needs to be."

My temper flares and I have to dig my nails into the palms of my hands to stop myself from lashing out. Wouldn't want to give him the excuse to call me just another savage from the New Narrows. "Gee, I can't possibly imagine why we wouldn't want your help," I say, slowly and deliberately shifting my long hair away from my neck and revealing the small needle puncture mark, a mark he'd undoubtedly recognise – after the madness gas swept in and took all of its victims, they had us all line up, to administer a injected form of the cure Batman had developed. You hardly see a person in the New Narrows without one. It's what marks you as a stranger.

The Deputy Commissioner's eyes brush over it for a second and then he rips his gaze away, his head twitching like it doesn't compute with him. He presses on. "What happened when you fell? Into the water? You hurt yourself, I take it," he says, gesturing at my bandages. I flush brightly. "No, I wore these to fit in," I reply sarcastically before I can stop myself. The Deputy Commissioner's jaw tightens. Blake shifts behind me, and I can see just enough of him to know that he's turning his head to hide the smile.

"You hurt your head? A concussion or something?"

I narrow my eyes. I know where he's going with this. "I was knocked unconscious, yes. But I know what I saw. That was _before _the unconscious part. You've got him telling you the exact same thing," I jab in Gordon's general direction. "How the fuck could we _both _manage to hallucinate the exact same thing? This isn't fucking _Inception_!"

"Alright, enough with that language," the Deputy Commissioner snaps, like a school teacher. "We will investigate the tunnels when we have the necessary man power and the legal permission-"

"You're not fucking serious!" I gasp.

"- _in the mean time_: we will send a few cars to keep watch outside of the stock market and outside of the sewer tunnels, to keep an eye on things."

"The fucking _Commissioner _got fucking _shot _and you're not going to do _jack shit about it_?!"

"I am _warning you_," the Deputy Commissioner shouts, the veins in his temples slamming against his skin as he snaps at me. "You keep speaking to me like that, and I will have you escorted out of the _building_!"

"Deputy Commissioner, she's right," Blake says urgently, and I feel a very satisfying rush of superiority. It takes all of my self control not to stick my tongue out and my middle finger up at the Deputy Commissioner. "Something big is going on down there and we need to-"

"_Officer Blake_. We have dealt with the gangs before, we will deal with them again. We have other cases that require our attention-"

"When?! When did you _deal _with the gangs?! You didn't do anything, the Batman stopped them!"

Saying the Batman is like firing a pistol straight into the air; the Deputy Commissioner's face leeches of colour in an instant, and he quivers slightly, vibrating like he's just about to explode. I have enough sense in me to stop talking and start backing away slightly. I bump into Blake, nudging his hand with my elbow accidentally, and he takes a step back too, as quiet as I am now.

"Officer Blake, can you please escort this woman from the building?"

The Deputy Commissioner's voice is like ice. Shards of ice. Filled with razor blades. And acid.

Blake feebly tries to attempt to reason with him again. "Sir-"

"_Now, officer_." There is no more questioning in this man's voice. Done.

I look desperately back at the Commissioner lying on the bed, his eyes watching the whole tableau with a defeated weariness. His eyes meet mine and he looks so sad I could cry.

He looks up at Blake then, and gives one, very small nod.

Blake shifts his body and curls one arm around my shoulder, still not touching me. "Let's go, miss."

He guides me out of the door, holding it open courteously for me again.

I take one last look back at Jim Gordon.

I hadn't noticed it before, but I see it now, his badge sitting on the bedside table next to a mountain of pills, dented and dulled with age and wear, but still very much with him.

That sight sends an energy through my veins that had begun to sap out of me. There's still hope. There's still something I can do.

I start marching as quickly as I can as soon as I'm through the door, stopping quickly at the crossroads in the hallway to look for an exit sign, and starting off again as soon as I spot one. I hear Blake shout my name, but I don't stop to look.

He catches my arm, tugging gently on it, forcing me to stand still. He has a wild look in his eyes. "Where do you think you're going?"

I try and prise my arm out of his, but he's holding firm. I clench my teeth and look up at him, jutting my jaw out defiantly. "You remember when you said I was braver than the entire police force?"

"I don't like where this is going."

"Well, tough, because that's exactly where I'm going. If you want to sit and wait, that's fine with me, but I physically cannot do it. I can't. So I'm… going."

He frowns, a smile forming on his lips despite himself. "Going where?"

"I don't know. Right at the heart of the action. Where all the danger is, and all that action hero bullshit."

"You know I can't let you do that, right? It's interfering with an ongoing investigation."

I give him a mischievous grin. "Who said anything about interfering? I just gots me an overwhelming urge to go and check the stock market."

Blake studies me, amusement fighting his policemanly duty. "You're going to go to the stock market?"

"I am indeed, officer."

"You have a ride?"

I blink, startled. I should have seen that coming, really. "Can't go wrong with the old public bus service."

Blake smiles. "I got something a lot faster and I promise we only have to stop off a few times to pick up complete strangers."

I grin back. "So long as I'm in the front of a police car this time, I'm game."

Blake's smile disappears for a moment, replaced with a touching look of concern. "First sign of disturbance, I want you to run out to the car and lock yourself in there, okay? No matter who you see there, got it?"

Will's face flashes into my mind. I can't promise that.

"I can't promise that."

Blake's jaw clenches. "If you don't, you might die."

"If I don't, Will might die."

"You leave that for me to worry about."

"That I simply cannot do. Worrying about him is all I do now."

Blake suddenly chuckles and mumbles something I can't quite catch. He looks back up at me. "First sign of trouble I see, I'm handcuffing you to the car." He starts walking quickly, speed-walking to the exit. I catch up, with some difficulty, my aching limbs still groaning. I throw him a quick grin in-between panting breaths. "Since when could a kid from the New Narrows not pick a lock?"


	11. Chapter 11

It's mid-afternoon by the time we reach the stock market building, hidden right in the very heart of Gotham City, and the constant stream of people doesn't seem to be slowing down even for a moment. Men in slick designer suits storm through like they've got a mission of the utmost importance to do, cell phone strapped to their ears, a heavy-looking black briefcase clasped tightly to their sides, and women teeter around in impossibly high-heeled shoes, walking as naturally as if they'd been born in them, so ridiculously groomed that I can feel myself instinctively run a hand over my unruly brown locks, fidgeting in the clothes that Blake had rescued from my apartment, a pair of dark blue jeans almost identical to the jeans I'd been wearing before and a loose-fitting black-and-grey striped t-shirt. We'd stopped at my building on the way over, parking a good few buildings down so as not to attract attention, and he'd gone in alone while I sat in the passenger seat, slouched down so low that my head could rest against the bottom of the window, peering out to see if anybody looked vaguely suspicious and/or threatening.

When Blake returned, I went to ask him about the state of my apartment. The look on his face gave me my answer and suddenly, I didn't feel the need to ask him anymore. I quietly thanked him for the clothes, grateful that he picked out something wearable and not too hideous. He'd nodded solemnly, started the car and gunned away from my building with a little more speed than was necessary.

"I think the hospital gown might have blended in a little bit more," I say as I open the door, trying to avoid the stares of the rich and powerful as they swagger about in their thousand-dollar costume of the day. Thinking about how much money they must have spent on these clothes makes me feel angry. Just selling one of these suits could give me enough money to last the rest of my damn life.

"If you want, I have a nice suit in the trunk of my car?" Blake offers, giving me a mischievous grin as he slams his door shut. His smile quickly fades as he looks at all of the people around us, and he quickly drops his gaze to the floor. He's clearly not used to all of this either. It makes him as uncomfortable as it makes me. That makes me feel a little less alone amongst all of them.

"Why do you have a suit in the trunk of your car?" I ask without looking at him, staring up at the building in front of me with wide eyes and an open mouth. I've never been inside one of these buildings before, and I've never particularly cared to, and the idea of going inside, like taking a peek inside the secret privileged world that has always kept its gates firmly closed to people like me, is actually quite scary. Not to mention every well-to-do person in there will be looking at me with the same curdled frown they always wear when a person from the New Narrows happens to fall into their path. Like a homeless dog they're publicly not allowed to kick away.

"You never know when you might need a good suit," Blake shrugs, standing next to me and staring up at the building too. His tone, playful and light, is the complete opposite of the expression on his face – he looks like he could be standing in a graveyard, he looks so solemn.

"I think, for this type of situation, I'd feel better wearing the sort of suits Batman used to wear," I say jokily. Upon hearing me, one of the people passing by, a woman, spins around on the spot and glowers at me with such hostility that I may as well have just tried to spit at her. I stare at her in bewildered astonishment as she whirls back around like an overly theatrical villain and stalks off into the crowd. I look at Blake and he looks equally as shocked. "What did I say? Batman?" It seems to be the kick-off word – as soon as the word escapes my lips, three other people look at me like I've just shouted curse words at them, like I'm a criminal or something. "What the hell is wrong with saying Batman?" I growl in frustration. "I like the Batman. _Liked _the Batman. He saved our lives, saved all of _their _lives… and that's what he gets back?"

"They think he killed somebody. Killed Harvey Dent," Blake says softly. "Harvey Dent was a great man to these people. To everybody."

"I never understood that part," I say quieter, shaking my head. I look at Blake conspiratorially, leaning closer to him. He ducks his head down to hear me better, and our faces are suddenly inches apart. I try not to focus on that face. "All Batman ever did was good things, saving us from Jonathan Crane and from the Joker and the gangs… he's a goddamn hero, and the next thing he decides to do… is kill an innocent guy? Harvey Dent, of all people, who was pretty much the closest thing Gotham will ever have to a saint. It just never made any sense to me."

"Yeah. Me neither," Blake says, looking back at the building. There's something about his expression that intrigues me. "You don't think he killed Harvey Dent? Or those other cops he killed? Supposedly?"

"No," Blake says slowly, exhaling loudly. "I don't think he killed anybody."

I process this, looking back at the building too. "So… what do _you _think happened?"

Blake shakes his head slowly. "I don't know. I just… do not know at all."

"Still," I sigh sadly. "It's a shame nobody can even say Batman any more without-" I stop as yet another person glowers at me. "Oh for the love of God. _Batman! Batman! __**BATMAN**__!_" I start shouting, enjoying the shocked looks on people's face as I yell the Batman's name over and over again.

"Would you stop that?!" Blake tries to say it in a stern, serious manner, but fails utterly, caught out by the huge smirk on his face. "What happened to trying to blend in?"

"Well that was clearly never going to happen, so maybe I'll root out the bad guys. With _**BATMAN**_," I shout as loudly as possibly, scaring the life out of some woman talking earnestly on her cell phone as she passes me. She practically snarls at me and then continues on past, undoubtedly already forgetting me. "Besides," I say, watching her go. "These people aren't going to care what I do and don't do here."

Blake's expression darkens. "Sadly, I think you have a point."

I nod at the building. "Shall we?"

"Only if you stop shouting Batman," Blake says quietly, lowering his voice on the last word.

"I'm sorry," I say as we start walking forwards. "What was that last word again?"

He gives me a look that's half amusement, half exasperation. "Stop it."

"No, I genuinely didn't hear you."

"Yeah, I'm sure you didn't."

"Was it something about the _**BATMAN**_?" I yell just as we reach the doors. The crowd around me seems to stop for one second to give me a unified look of disgust and then it moves on. Blake glares down at me and I smirk back. "I swear to God I'll stop now."

"Please."

(O)

Stepping inside the stock market is a little surreal: as we wait in line for the security check, I can hear a dim roaring sound, like there's an arena full of people watching a gladiator battle. I glance back at Blake and he gives me the same bewildered look that must be on my face right now.

"Next!" the security woman barks and I scuttle forward nervously. She's a tough looking woman, and the expression on her face reminds me of one an army sergeant might face you with. "Look up at the camera for me," she says, jabbing a gloved finger into the top right hand corner of the room and I follow it, staring at the wall with wide, doe eyes. I honestly can't see a camera at all, but apparently it captures my image because the woman gives a curt nod and practically shoves me forward, summoning Blake with a short, sharp snap. I stand frozen behind her, uncertain of what to do next. To be honest, I'd almost rather be traipsing around back down in Bane's lair. My palms feel itchy and I get the overwhelming urge to start shouting Batman again. Perhaps not a good idea here. The scary security lady might tackle me to the ground as soon as she hears the word 'Bat'.

Thankfully, Blake catches me up quickly, flashing his badge for her and then tilting his face for the camera, looking a little bit like a model as he does so. As soon as he's finished, he darts over to me and asks me if I'm okay, examining my face with unnecessary concern. "It was a little less scary being down in the sewers," I joke. Blake glances over his shoulder at the security woman and chuckles. "Yeah, I bet," he says in a low, throaty voice and then nods. "Let's go to the main floor."

It's even scarier up here; there are people everywhere, the same well-dressed and immaculately groomed people that were parading around outside, but they're different in here. They shout at each other and they wave their arms in violent, flailing motions, like they'd very much like to start beating the shit out of each other. It's hard to hear anything other than the roaring of the powerful as they scream, at each other, at machines, or just because they need to get all the screaming out of their systems.

"Rich people are batshit crazy," I note to Blake, eyeing the people around me with concern. "Are they actually doing anything or are they just shouting at monitors?"

"It's probably the second option."

We move to the centre of the room, stopping when we reach another island of monitors, circled by more ravenous, angry rich people. I try not to touch any of them just in case the slightest provocation sends them into a murderous frenzy. I sincerely don't think it would take that much to do so.

"Do you have any idea of what we're looking for?" Blake murmurs quietly. I shake my head, trying to examine the sea of faces for one that I recognise, even if it's only a faint recognition. "I don't know. Bane, maybe? He's not exactly hard to miss."

"We have to tell the security team about the potential threat," Blake says, and begins to walk off, pushing his way through the throngs with a firm hand. I tail after him, shoving a little harder than he had to as people refuse to budge even an inch. "Wouldn't the Deputy Commissioner have done that already?"

"Well," Blake says, his voice hiding a hint of disapproval for his superior. "We'll just go make sure he has."

I follow him out of the room, out into the open; we walk past two men having their shoes shined, something I swear had disappeared in the early 1900s, and I feel a wave of revulsion hit me. They both look so casual about it too. I look down at the face of the shoe-shiner, pity swelling in my heart.

The pity cuts out when I recognise his face.

_Jacob. The guy who brought me down into the sewers._

Oh shit.

I turn my face away before he can see me, my heart beating so face that I can't even hear myself think. I don't even see Blake approach me until he puts his hands on my face, lifting my chin up to meet his eyes. He looks so worried. "What is it?" he asks, his eyes darting over my shoulders, expecting danger. I lean in closer, looking like I'm resting my head on his shoulders, and I whisper "The shoe shiner. He was one of them."

Blake's body goes rigid and he straightens up, his hand frozen on my face. His eyes are fixed to the back of Jacob's head and his hand strays downwards, towards his weapon.

I put my hands on his, stopping him. He drags his gaze back to meet mine, and his eyes are wild. "Go get back into the car, right now."

"I'm not leaving you here."

"Yes, you are, and you're locking the car doors as you go, you got it? Go, _now_."

"No," I hiss defiantly, but Blake is determined. "Don't make me ask them to escort you out of here, now _**go**_."

I glower back up at him, but I start backing out, walking as quickly as possible. I turn around, looking over my shoulder at Blake; he's distracted, talking earnestly into a radio while also maintaining a rapid-fire conversation with one of the security guards. The guard says something quickly and then they both disappear, walking so quickly they're nearly running.

I start heading back into the main room, carefully hiding my face behind a curtain of hair as I walk past Jacob. _They're here, they're here right now. What the fuck do I do?!_ Do I start making people leave? There's literally nothing I can think of that could make them leave, not even screaming the word 'Batman' over and over again. I wonder how far Bane is behind them. Vivid blue eyes suddenly flash into my mind and the memory of them is so painful it flashes through my head like a migraine. I can feel somebody's body standing directly behind me, so close that their body heat warms my back, and I whirl around, hands raised. The suited businessman behind me barely even notices my existence as he shoves himself forwards, trying to get closer to the monitors. I stagger backwards, breathing heavily, trying to let myself get into a full-scale panic. Everywhere I turn, I see Bane standing there, staring at me from behind a gaggle of people, only to fade away when they scatter a little. This panic wouldn't be so bad if Blake was here. If _Will _was here. But I am alone and I am terrified beyond rational capacity and I have no idea why it was so important for me to come back in here. There's literally nothing I can do, I've already established that. Here I'll just get killed.

I have to get out of here.

I turn towards the doorway, pushing violently past people, feeling my breathing getting more and more shallow, faster and faster, heavier and heavier. My vision swims before me and I see black spots. Oh god, I'm going to pass out, I can feel it, I'm about to pass out, right here and right now, and nobody will even notice a thing.

And then, a gunshot rings out. And then another. And then another. People start screaming.

Bane is here.

Well, fuck.


End file.
